Welcome to Science Saturday, where the Overnight News Digest crew informs and entertains you with this week's news about science, space, and the environment.
This week's featured story comes from Wired.
Say It Ain't So: Science, Energy on Stimulus Chopping Block
By Betsy Mason
Does a nearly $1 trillion economic stimulus bill in the wake of $700 billion package that seems to have had little effect sound excessive to you? If so, you're not alone: Two U.S. senators are negotiating to cut $88 billion out of the version of the bill that passed the House of Representatives on January 28.
Sounds reasonable. Until you take a closer look at the proposed cuts, that is.
Among the biggest losers are science, energy and education. Huh? We may be biased over here at Wired Science, but in our view, science, energy and education should be at the top of the list of stimulus priorities rather than the first to go.
More science, space, and environment news after the jump.
Slideshows/Videos
Wired: Amazing Chemicals Invented by Nature, Rebuilt in Lab
By Aaron Rowe
Natural substances can treat cancer, prolong life and trigger amazing hallucinations.
But although nature can make a remarkably wide variety of chemicals — far more than the best molecule-making robots — it does not always deliver them in bulk. Drug companies and medical researchers often turn to organic chemists when they need something that is too rare or too difficult to harvest from the wild.
Many researchers enjoy the challenge of building complicated molecules from scratch in their laboratories, testing their skills in service of a worthwhile goal. Duplicating Mother Nature isn't easy, and sometimes the journey is almost as impressive as the chemicals themselves.
Wired on YouTube: Installing a Deep-Sea Webcam
Last week, the world's first deep-sea webcam was installed on the floor of California's Monterey Bay, giving scientists an unimpeded look at deep-sea life. Wired went along for the ride.
TED on YouTube: Bill Gates: How I'm trying to change the world now
Bill Gates hopes to solve some of the world's biggest problems using a new kind of philanthropy. In a passionate and, yes, funny 18 minutes, he asks us to consider two big questions and how we might answer them.
This was the talk that Faux Noise reduced to Gates unleashing a swarm of mosquitos on an unsuspecting audience. It's really much more, and much better than that. After watching the entire video, I said, "that was 20 minutes well spent."
National Geographic on YouTube: Inside Darwin's Mind
The oddity of flightless birds leads Darwin to question the intentions of the Creator.
National Geographic on YouTube: Tomb of 1,000 Roman Skeletons
To understand what is exceptional about the 1,000 Roman bodies, researchers investigate typical Roman burial practices.
National Geographic on YouTube: From Dino to Turkey
Next year at Thanksgiving dinner, imagine you're eating a dinosaur. You won't be far from the truth.
National Geographic on YouTube: Ocean Census
Scientists searching the depths of the ocean for undiscovered marine life off the coast of Maine get help from a well-equipped robot.
National Geographic on YouTube: Utah Dinos
Some 93 million years ago, dinosaur-era "sea monsters" swam the seas above what is now Utah. Thanks to paleontologists, more evidence of the ancient beasts is now surfacing.
National Geographic on YouTube: Giant Prehistoric Bear
In the struggle for survival, the giant short-faced bear evolved into a towering killing machine.
National Geographic on YouTube: Ancient Whale Bones
In the plains of Pakistan, archaeologists discover clues to help solve the mystery of how land mammals became whales.
National Geographic on YouTube: Solar Storm
Scientists use data to create models of solar storms -- violent, dangerous, and more powerful than anything on Earth.
Discovery Networks on YouTube: Historic Wreck Found, Rewrites History
One of the greatest ships in British military history went down without a trace. But now, the search is over. Kasey-Dee Gardner has the story.
Discovery Networks on YouTube: Dave's Space Disco - Feb. 2, 2009
This week in space: Solar Eclipse, Vote on Hubble, Dropped Satellite, One Hot Exoplanet, Lakes on Saturn's Moon Titan
Discovery Networks on YouTube: Lizards Show Evolution in Action
Fire ant attacks are forcing fence lizards to evolve to survive. James Williams takes a look at what's going on.
Discovery Networks on YouTube: Electric Car Feeds Grid
V2G technology can turn an electric car into a moving power station. Jorge Ribas rides shotgun with Willett Kempton, the man behind the concept.
New Scientist on YouTube: Robotic hand that feels real
The rubber hand illusion is being exploited by prosthetic limbs to make them feel like the real thing.
Astronomy/Space
Wired: Strange Galaxy Is a Beautiful Wimp
By Clara Moskowitz
This new Hubble photo reveals a strange galaxy in a far off cluster of galaxies called the Coma cluster.
The galaxy, NGC 4921, is unusual because of its light, wispy swirls. These aren't as distinguished and bright as the spiral arms in most spiral galaxies, which are powered by the active creation of new stars. This weak-limbed galaxy belongs to a class called "anemic spirals," named for their wimpy arms and weak star formation.
Wired: Smallest Exoplanet Is Most Earth-like Yet
By Clara Moskowitz
The smallest exoplanet ever seen is less than twice the size of Earth, and orbits a star similar to our sun 390 light years away. Astronomers recently spotted this world, the most Earth-like planet yet discovered, with the COROT satellite.
"For the first time, we have unambiguously detected a planet that is 'rocky' in the same sense as our own Earth," said Malcolm Fridlund, ESA COROT project scientist.
For all its similarity to our own globe, though, it is still a far cry away from a habitable Earth-twin. For one thing, it is so hot — between 1,830 and 2,730 degrees Fahrenheit — that scientists think it might be covered in lava. It orbits extremely close to its sun and whips around the star once every 20 hours.
Reuters: Earth-hunter telescope prepared for launch
By Irene Klotz
NASA unveiled a modest telescope on Friday with a sweeping mission -- to discover if there are any Earth-type planets orbiting distant stars.
Though astronomers have found more than 330 planets circling stars in other solar systems, none has the size and location that is believed to be key to supporting life.
"A null result is as important as finding planets," Michael Bicay, director of science at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told reporters in Titusville, Florida, where the Kepler telescope is being prepared for launch.
Reuters: NASA delays shuttle launch to February 22
By Irene Klotz
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA Friday delayed the launch of the shuttle Discovery's mission to the International Space Station by three more days, to February 22, to allow more time to test potentially troublesome fuel valves.
The year's first shuttle mission had initially been planned for next Thursday, but was already delayed by a week to research issues with valves that keep the shuttle's fuel tank properly pressurized during the 8 1/2-minute climb to orbit.
Evolution/Paleontology
Wired: Oldest Animal Fossils Discovered
By Brandon Keim
Fossil traces found in an oil field on the Arabian Peninsula are the oldest evidence yet of animals, pushing back the known origins of higher life to more than 635 million years ago.
The animals' remains don't look like traditional fossils. They're more like fossil echoes: chemical traces of a compound only produced — at least in modern times — by demosponges, descendants of what some scientists consider to be the last common ancestor of all animals.
"It is, definitively, the earliest evidence for animals," said geochemist Gordon Love of the University of California, Riverside, lead author of the study published Wednesday in Nature.
Wired: Freaky Claw-Headed Fossil Could Explain Scorpion Origins
By Brandon Keim
If you think scorpions are scary, just take a look at this guy.
Named Schinderhannes bartelsi, it was found in fossilized form in a German quarry, and dates to 390 million years ago.
That's about 100 million years after the extinction of the last known animal to sport what's technically known as a "great appendage" — a giant claw growing out of its head.
There is more on this discovery at Science Daily.
Wired: Tropical Turtle Fossil Discovered in the High Arctic
By Michael Wall
A strikingly preserved tropical turtle fossil discovered in the Canadian High Arctic is giving scientists a look into an ancient, carbon-dioxide-warmed world.
The freshwater turtle, dubbed Aurorachelys, was an Asian species that researchers believe migrated across the North Pole 90 million years ago as temperatures were peaking. The find suggests that animals moved into North America via a polar route rather than around Alaska, as was previously believed.
"The fossil record is giving us more and more information about how ancient animals responded to a warming world," geophysicist John Tarduno of the University of Rochester, co-author of a study published Sunday in Geology. "They moved toward the poles."
Reuters: Titanic ancient snake was as long as Tyrannosaurus
By Will Dunham
It was the all-time titan of snakes -- a monster as long as a Tyrannosaurus rex that stalked a steamy South American rain forest after the demise of the dinosaurs and ate crocodiles for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
An international team of scientists on Wednesday announced the discovery in northern Colombia of fossil remains of the largest snake ever known to have lived. It is named Titanoboa cerrejonensis, meaning titanic boa from Cerrejon, the open-pit coal mine where its fossils were found.
Titanoboa was at least 43 feet long, weighed 2,500 pounds (1,140 kg) and its massive body was at least 3 feet (1 meter) wide, they wrote in the journal Nature.
Hat tip to my friend Edson Smith, who was featured in one of my earlier ONDs, for this story.
Wired: Transitional Whale Species Hunted at Sea, Gave Birth on Land
By Brandon Keim
Early whales hunted at sea but spent the rest of their time on land, suggest two newly-described fossil whales — one of them a pregnant female — believed to represent a transitional species between earth- and water-bound behemoths.
Dating from 47.5 million years ago, the whales had large teeth suited for consuming fish, and flipper-like limbs that could support their weight on land, albeit awkwardly. The fetal skeleton was positioned for head-first delivery, typically seen in land mammals. Modern whales give birth tail-first.
Wired: Lucy 2.0: Famous Fossil Hominid Goes Digital
By Wired Science
Lucy, the world's most famous fossil human ancestor, has gone digital in 3-D. A new high-resolution CT scan of the 3.2 million-year-old skeleton will provide scientists around the globe with information that may help settle debates about human evolution.
The virtual Lucy could prove invaluable to scientists by giving them their first glimpse inside her fossilized bones. The scans reveal microscopic details of the internal structure of Lucy’s bones and teeth that give clues to how she moved and ate.
"These scans will ensure that future generations are familiar with Lucy," said Jara Mariam, director general of Ethiopia’s Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage, "and will know of Ethiopia’s central contribution to the study of human evolution. A virtual Lucy will be able to visit every classroom on the planet."
Wired: Black Wolves the Result of Interbreeding With Dogs
By Michael Wall
The black fur of some North American wolves is the result of long-ago dalliances with domestic dogs, probably the companions of the earliest Native Americans.
And a black coat seems to provide an advantage to forest-dwelling wolves, meaning dogs passed on some useful genetic diversity to their wild cousins.
"This is pretty unique," said biologist Tovi Anderson of Stanford University, lead author of the study published Thursday in Science. "Typically, you’d expect gene flow from domestic to wild animals would not be beneficial."
Biodiversity
Wired: Rising Ocean Acidity Could Disorient Fish
By Brandon Keim
Fish may be literally incapable of finding home in the acidified seas of a carbon-soaked future.
When they're raised in waters with an acidity comparable to what's expected by the 21st century's end, baby clownfish — an aquarium favorite that relies on smell to find home — failed to respond to familiar smells.
"If acidification continues unabated, the impairment of sensory ability will reduce population sustainability of many marine species, with potentially profound consequences for marine diversity," wrote researchers led by marine biologists Philip Munday and Kjell Døving.
Reuters: Ten new amphibian species discovered in Colombia
By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent
Ten new species of amphibians -- including three kinds of poisonous frogs and three transparent-skinned glass frogs -- have been discovered in the mountains of Colombia, conservationists said Monday.
With amphibians under threat around the globe, the discovery was an encouraging sign and reason to protect the area where they were found, said Robin Moore, an amphibian expert at the environmental group Conservation International.
The nine frog species and one salamander species were found in the mountainous Tacarcuna area of the Darien region near Colombia's border with Panama.
Wired: Melting Arctic Prompts Calls for 'National Park' on Ice
By Brandon Keim
With arctic sea ice melting like ice cubes in soda, scientists want to protect a region they say will someday be the sole remaining frozen bastion of a disappearing world.
Spanning the northern Canadian archipelago and western Greenland, it would be the first area formally protected in response to climate change, and a last-ditch effort to save polar bears and other animals.
"All the indications are of huge change, and a huge response is needed if you want to have polar bears beyond 2050," said Peter Ewins, the World Wildlife Fund's Director of Species Conservation.
Reuters: Older is better for whale moms: study
Reporting by Maggie Fox, Editing by Sandra Maler
Older mothers may do a better job raising their children than younger, less-experienced moms, at least among killer whales, researchers reported on Monday.
They studied 30 years of data to show that calves born to the oldest killer whales were 10 percent more likely to survive the critical first year of life than calves born to younger mothers.
"Older mothers appear to be better mothers, producing calves with higher survival rates," Eric Ward of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle and colleagues wrote in the journal Frontiers in Zoology.
Biotechnology/Health
Wired: TED: Biologist Says Chatty Bacteria Are the Secret to Fighting Disease
By Kim Zetter
Bacteria aren't bad.
That was the message molecular biologist Bonnie Bassler of Princeton University gave in her surprisingly rousing TED talk on bacterial intelligence. Bacteria are essential to our survival since they help us digest food. But more than this, bacteria are social entities that act in concert, Bassler said.
Using something that Bassler calls "quorum sensing," bacteria communicate to coordinate all kinds of activity, including the spread of diseases. This has huge implications for fighting illneses.
Wired: Research Breakthrough: Human Clones May Be Genetically Viable
By Brandon Keim
For the first time since Hwang Woo-Suk's cloned stem cells were revealed as fakes, human cloning — for medical purposes, or even for reproduction — appears to be a realistic possibility.
"We show for the first time that the same genes turned on in normal human embryos are the same genes turned on in human clones," said Robert Lanza, scientific director of Advanced Cell Technologies and co-author of a study published Monday in Cloning and Stem Cells.
Lanza's team inserted human cell nuclei into hollowed-out egg cells from both humans and animals, then stimulated them into development, a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), or more informally, cloning. When compared to a normal human embryo produced through in vitro fertilization, the animal-human hybrids didn't develop normally, but the human-human cloned embryos displayed many of the genetic characteristics of healthy development.
Wired: Trial Begins for HIV Gene Therapy
By Aaron Rowe
Gene therapy that could immunize people against the most common type of HIV is ready to be tested on humans.
Recruiting for the trial began Tuesday, and the first people to receive the experimental treatment will be HIV patients with drug-resistance problems.
"We do have good treatments for HIV. That has been one of the most successful stories of the last 20 years in medicine," said Pablo Tebas, an infectious disease expert at the University of Pennsylvania.
Reuters: Mosquito genes could be target in malaria fight
By Michael Kahn
Researchers say they have identified genes that make some African malaria-carrying mosquitoes resistant to insecticide, and hope the breakthrough could boost efforts to prevent the deadly disease.
Knowing which genes help the mosquitoes dodge pesticides could point to ways to make better ones that are safer for people, too, said Charles Wondji of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and colleagues.
"We expected to find that different species and populations would have different groups of genes responsible but they are very similar," Wondji said in a statement.
Reuters: Flu may not have killed most in 1918 pandemic
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
Strep infections and not the flu virus itself may have killed most people during the 1918 influenza pandemic, which suggests some of the most dire predictions about a new pandemic may be exaggerated, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
The findings suggest that amassing antibiotics to fight bacterial infections may be at least as important as stockpiling antiviral drugs to battle flu, they said.
Keith Klugman of Emory University in Atlanta and colleagues looked at what information is available about the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed anywhere between 50 million and 100 million people globally in the space of about 18 months.
Climate/Environment
Reuters: La Nina seen gradually weakening in 2009: NOAA
Reporting by Rene Pastor; editing by Jim Marshall
The La Nina weather anomaly will persist into the spring of 2009 but should gradually weaken during that period, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center said on Thursday.
In a monthly update, the CPC said "a majority of the model forecasts ... indicate a gradual weakening of La Nina through February-April 2009, with an eventual transition to neutral conditions."
CPC is an office under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The body said La Nina will last into spring of this year.
Geology/Geophysics
Wired: Man-Made Dam May Have Triggered Great China Quake
By Betsy Mason
The weight of the water in a man-made reservoir may have triggered the massive earthquake that struck China in May killing more than 70,000 people.
Immediately following the quake, scientists began to suspect the Zipingpu Dam may have set off the 7.9 jolt. Now evidence is starting to emerge that suggests they may have been right.
The 500-foot tall Zipingpu Dam, built to generate hydroelectric power to support growth in the area, holds more than 300 million tons of water behind it and is located less than a third of a mile from the fault that ruptured and 3.4 miles from the epicenter of the Wenchuan earthquake. The added weight of the reservoir may have changed the stress in the area just enough to set off an earthquake that was waiting to happen.
Psychology/Behavior
Wired: Cognitive Computing Project Aims to Reverse-Engineer the Mind
By Priya Ganapati
Imagine a computer that can process text, video and audio in an instant, solve problems on the fly, and do it all while consuming just 10 watts of power.
It would be the ultimate computing machine if it were built with silicon instead of human nerve cells.
Compare that to current computers, which require extensive, custom programming for each application, consume hundreds of watts in power, and are still not fast enough. So it's no surprise that some computer scientists want to go back to the drawing board and try building computers that more closely emulate nature.
Wired: TED Q&A: Neurologist Oliver Sacks
By Kim Zetter
British neurologist Oliver Sacks is renowned for turning the medical mysteries of his patients into compelling literary narratives through books such as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
But two years ago, Sacks found himself in the midst of his own unfolding medical narrative. Diagnosed with ocular melanoma in his right eye in 2006, Sacks slowly lost central vision in that eye as an inkblot the shape of Australia blotted out all but a small "crescent" of peripheral vision, leaving him without stereo vision, or 3D perception.
To compensate for the missing visual data once supplied by his right eye, his brain has projected hallucinations and patterns onto the dark stage -– a phenomenon common to people who have lost their sight. Ever curious about the mind's varied responses to disease, Sacks has chronicled it all in a series of unpublished journals containing drawings and writings.
Wired: TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense -- Video
By Kim Zetter
LONG BEACH, California -- Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they're done.
Pattie Maes of the lab's Fluid Interfaces group said the research is aimed at creating a new digital "sixth sense" for humans.
In the tactile world, we use our five senses to take in information about our environment and respond to it, Maes explained. But a lot of the information that helps us understand and respond to the world doesn't come from these senses. Instead, it comes from computers and the internet. Maes' goal is to harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses.
Wired: TED: Dan Ariely on Why We Cheat
By Kim Zetter
Dan Ariely is a people hacker. A professor of behavioral economics at Duke University and MIT as well as director of MIT's Center for Advanced Hindsight, Ariely deconstructs human behavior to find the hidden ways we deceive ourselves about the things we do and to construct better ways of resolving some of life's issues.
Ariely, who was born in the U.S. and raised in Israel, wrote a book called Predictably Irrational, which showed how people are irrational in calculable and dependable ways. He's also conducted tests on cheating that produced some interesting results.
...
Conventional wisdom assumes people cheat based on whether they think they'll get caught and the level of punishment they’ll receive. But Ariely says other factors come into play.
Wired: TED: Barry Schwartz and the Importance of Practical Wisdom
By Kim Zetter
LONG BEACH, California -- Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz, author of the Paradox of Choice delivers the final presentation of TED 2009 on Saturday. He spoke previously at TED about the suffering and paralysis that having too much choice engenders.
Lately he and Swarthmore colleague Kenneth Sharpe have been examining wisdom, in particular "practical wisdom," which Schwartz says is in short supply these days. Wired.com spoke to Schwartz about wisdom, moral skill without moral will, and the Machiavellian motivations of Bernard Madoff.
Wired: TED: Eat, Pray, Love Author on How We Kill Geniuses
By Kim Zetter
LONG BEACH, California -- Author Elizabeth Gilbert, famous for her bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, suggested Thursday that we kill geniuses by demanding super-human powers from them.
The problem, she says, lies in how we attribute the qualities of geniusness.
Instead of seeing the individual as a genius, we should view the brilliance as a gift from an unknowable outside source -- some might call it a muse, others a fairy or god force -- that visits us on occasion to participate in an act of creation, and then leaves to help someone else. Gilbert was referring primarily to those in the arts, but her talk applied to anyone who creates something sublime, whether it's a painting in the Sistine Chapel or a quantum equation.
Gilbert received a full standing ovation for her talk from an audience of people who generally don't give in to beliefs about muses, fairies and god forces.
Wired: Seeing Red: Tweak Your Brain With Colors
By Brandon Keim
For an all-natural brain boost, skip the pills and hit the colors.
In the latest and most authoritative study on color's cognitive effects, test subjects given attention-demanding tasks did best when primed with the color red. Asked to be creative, they responded best to blue.
"Color enhances performance," said study co-author Juliet Zhu, a University of British Columbia psychologist.
Wired: Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains
By Brandon Keim
Paying attention isn't a simple act of self-discipline, but a cognitive ability with deep neurobiological roots — and this complex faculty, says Maggie Jackson, is being woefully undermined by how we're living.
In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Jackson explores the effects of "our high-speed, overloaded, split-focus and even cybercentric society" on attention. It's not a pretty picture: a never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively.
Of course, every modern age is troubled by its new technologies. "The telegraph might have done just as much to the psyche [of] Victorians as the Blackberry does to us," said Jackson. "But at the same time, that doesn't mean that nothing has changed. The question is, how do we confront our own challenges?"
Wired: Taking Traffic Control Lessons — From Ants
By Brandon Keim
If humans took their cues from ants, they might spend less time in traffic.
When opposing streams of leafcutter ants share a narrow path, they instinctively alternate flows in the most efficient way possible. Studying how ants manage this could provide the basis for a system of driverless cars running on ant traffic algorithms.
"They never get stuck in traffic," said Audrey Dussutour, a University of Sydney entomologist. "We should use their rules. I've been working with ants for eight years, and have never seen a traffic jam — and I've tried."
Reuters: How moms pass on experience without even trying
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
Mothers can pass along their experiences to their children without even trying, researchers reported in a surprising study on Tuesday that showed baby mice could inherit the benefits of "education" that their mothers received before they became pregnant.
The study shows that inheritance can go far beyond the classic genetic theories, researchers report in The Journal of Neuroscience.
They found that young mice raised in an enriched environment -- with toys and other stimulation -- passed along the learning benefits to pups they had after they grew up.
Archeology/Anthropology
N.Y. Times: Mystery of Ancient Pueblo Jars Is Solved
By MICHAEL HAEDERLE
ALBUQUERQUE — For years Patricia Crown puzzled over the cylindrical clay jars found in the ruins at Chaco Canyon, the great complex of multistory masonry dwellings set amid the arid mesas of northwestern New Mexico. They were utterly unlike other pots and pitchers she had seen.
Some scholars believed that Chaco’s inhabitants, ancestors of the modern Pueblo people of the Southwest, had stretched skins across the cylinders and used them for drums, while others thought they held sacred objects.
But the answer is simpler, though no less intriguing, Ms. Crown asserts in a paper published Tuesday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the jars were used for drinking liquid chocolate. Her findings offer the first proof of chocolate use in North America north of the Mexican border.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above article.
Wired: Network Theory Could Regulate Human Reproduction
By Brandon Keim
The human race may be caught in a biological catch-22, in which sustainable reproduction rates can only be achieved by consuming more energy.
So hypothesizes Melanie Moses, a University of New Mexico computer scientist who wonders if human societies are bound by size-dependent rules of network efficiency seen elsewhere in the biological world.
If the implications of this seem bleak, take heart: people are born to break the rules.
Physics
Wired: I See Your Petaflop and Raise You 19 More
By Alexis Madrigal
Just a year after the world's fastest supercomputers broke the petaflop barrier by performing one thousand trillion calculations per second, nuclear physicists are planning a 20-petaflop machine in conjunction with IBM.
Nicknamed Sequoia, the Department of Energy computer will most likely be the most powerful in the world when it is released. If it were running today, it'd be more than 10 times faster than any machine in existence.
When it's installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2012, it could make new kinds of calculations possible, but initially, that power will be primarily used to simulate nuclear explosions, as many of its supercomputer forebears have done.
Chemistry
Wired: World's Smallest Cars Have Moving Parts
By Aaron Rowe
Car-shaped molecules can zip around on a glass slide at about nine nanomiles per hour, and their wheels actually turn.
Understanding how these nanocars move could make it easier for researchers to build more sophisticated molecular machines.
"These are, of course, the world's smallest cars," says Jim Tour, a chemist at Rice University who has been making the cars for years. "We have considered (getting) nanoinsurance. I asked my friends at Motorola if they would make 6 x 1023 car phones for our mole of nanocars."
Science, Space, Environment, and Energy Policy
Reuters: "Green growth" puts climate spending in focus
By Gerard Wynn - Analysis
LONDON (Reuters) - The United States, Europe and other nations will spend about $100 billion on projects to fight climate change under economic stimulus plans, raising questions about how much support the industry needs.
Spending money through a recession to boost jobs is well established, but the long term value-for-money of current support for clean energy is questioned.
Political and business leaders have called for "green growth" spending over the next two to three years to boost fossil fuel alternatives and cut carbon emissions, and create jobs and help a sector wilting in the downturn.
This article is accompanied by a FACTBOX: Global green stimulus plans.
Reuters: Small firms see green in pending stimulus package
By Deborah L. Cohen
When the government starts doling out tax dollars to kick-start the economy, companies offering green products are hoping to be high up in the pecking order for contracts.
The final economic stimulus package, priced at nearly $1 trillion, will funnel funds to infrastructure improvements ranging from bridges to schools and alternative energy grids.
"The stimulus package gives us tremendous ability to do what we set out to do," says Govi Rao, chief executive of Westampton, New Jersey-based Lighting Science Group Corp., a six-month-old company that is banking on the increased popularity of energy efficient lighting using LED, or light emitting diode, technology. "With the stimulus package, government procurement, the need is immediate."
Reuters: Not all "green" jobs pay well
By Tom Doggett
The Obama administration has high hopes that millions of "green" jobs will be created by investing billions of dollars in renewable energy, but a report on Tuesday warned not all those workers would earn good pay.
"Green jobs are not automatically good jobs," according to the report commissioned by several U.S. labor and environmental groups, which looked at pay practices at renewable energy companies.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Rep. Jay Inslee of Washington, both Democrats released the report a day before hundreds of labor, environmental and business activists were scheduled to go to Capitol Hill to lobby for good-paying green jobs.
Reuters: Antarctic patents strain goals of shared science
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
ROTHERA BASE, Antarctica (Reuters) - Fifty years into a treaty demanding all scientific findings on Antarctica be freely shared, governments are trying to end a dispute over a surge in company patents on life in the continent.
An increasing number of companies developing new products through biological discovery or "bioprospecting" are trying to file patents on Antarctic organisms or molecules for items from cosmetics to medicines, putting new strains on the treaty.
"Biology is going through a revolution ... it's a tricky situation," Jose Retamales, head of the Chilean Antarctic Institute, said of the lack of clear rules for prospecting for animals and plants on the continent.
Reuters: Tech forum looks past economy to future
By David Lawsky
LONG BEACH, California (Reuters) - More cancers will be preventable in 5 to 10 years, using a vaccine. People wearing artificial feet may scale walls a la Spider-Man. Robots will come with lifelike faces that convey human emotion.
That was just a sampling of the technology envisioned for the future at TED, the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design gathering of corporate, Hollywood and scientific glitterati touted as a caldron of ideas and innovation.
But this year, optimism for the future might have been clouded somewhat by a grim present reality -- how to bankroll embryonic initiatives when capital markets are sputtering and enthusiasm wanes for financially risky investments.
Science Education
Reuters: Zoos lack funds to inspire Obama's future scientists
By Claudia Parsons
Science class for a group of 12-year-old New Yorkers frequently means a day at the zoo, petting a monitor lizard, laughing at infant gorillas as they wrestle or seeing how a giant rock python hunts in the dark.
"I love animals and it's fun," said Marquis Palmer, 12.
"If nobody cared about animals they would all be dead. Plus, we wouldn't really have anything to eat," he said, with a mischievous grin, explaining why he loves science during a recent scavenger hunt at the Bronx Zoo's Congo exhibit.
Science Reporting
Wired: Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge
By Clive Thompson
Is global warming caused by humans? Is Barack Obama a Christian? Is evolution a well-supported theory?
You might think these questions have been incontrovertibly answered in the affirmative, proven by settled facts. But for a lot of Americans, they haven't. Among Republicans, belief in anthropogenic global warming declined from 52 percent to 42 percent between 2003 and 2008. Just days before the election, nearly a quarter of respondents in one Texas poll were convinced that Obama is a Muslim. And the proportion of Americans who believe God did not guide evolution? It's 14 percent today, a two-point decline since the '90s, according to Gallup.
What's going on? Normally, we expect society to progress, amassing deeper scientific understanding and basic facts every year. Knowledge only increases, right?
Science is Cool
Wired: TED Prize Winners Want Help Finding Life, Protecting Oceans and Creating Musical Kids
By Kim Zetter
One wish has already come true for an oceanographer, an astronomer and a musician at the TED conference -- and now they each get another big one, as recipients of the exclusive annual collective's award of $100,000 and the chance to source a rarified crowd for solutions to a pressing pet project.
For her wish, oceanographer Sylvia Earle wants the invite-only attendees of the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference to come up with a way to protect the oceans by using all means necessary to promote their plight.
Astronomer Jill Cornell Tarter, director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute's Center for SETI Research, is looking for a way to "empower earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company."
And Jose Antonio Abreu, a former economist and trained musician whose has introduced some 200,000 Venezuelan children to classical music, wants the TED community to create a similar program "for at least 50 gifted young musicians" in the United States and elsewhere.
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