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.
Scientists Agree: It's in His Kiss
By Betsy Mason
You may call it love, but scientists call it philematology.
And according to experts in this field (yes, there are at least three of them), the 60's pop song got it right: It really is in his kiss.
"Kissing is a mechanism for mate choice and mate assessment," Helen Fisher, a Biological Anthropologist from Rutgers University here at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said to a press conference crowded with science journalists hoping for a story or, perhaps, some advice.
More science, space, and environment news after the jump.
Slideshows/Videos
Reuters: Darwin's home reopens
Feb 12 - The home where British scientist Charles Darwin penned his famous "On the Origin of Species" reopens to the public.
The newly renovated Down House, where Darwin lived for 40 years, opened its doors to mark 200 years since his birth.
Reuters: U.S. and Russia satellites collide
Feb. 12 - A privately owned U.S. communications satellite -- owned by Iridium-- collided with a defunct Russian military satellite above Russia's Arctic north.
Reuters: Tom Hanks visits CERN
Feb 12 - The European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) hosted a visit by "Angels & Demons" film Director Ron Howard and leading actors Tom Hanks and Ayelet Zurer.
Parts of the film, an adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling novel "Angels and Demons," were shot at the facility.
Wired: White Dwarf: Dead Star Shining
By Clara Moskowitz
At the end of a star's lifetime, when it's burned all there is inside it to burn, it often collapses into what's called a white dwarf star. These dense globes have roughly the mass of the sun packed tight into a ball the size of the Earth. Since there is no fuel left for fusion in white dwarfs, they shine only faintly, by emitting stored heat. A white dwarf is thought to be the end stage awaiting most of the stars in our galactic neighborhood, including the sun — only about 3 percent of nearby stars have masses so huge that they collapse even further in supernova explosions. Here are some especially interesting white dwarfs
Astronomy/Space
Reuters: Scientists aware satellite paths would be close
By Tim Hepher
PARIS (Reuters) - European space scientists were aware of the potential for a close encounter between Russian and U.S. satellites before they crashed.
But the difficulty of predicting orbits and "noise" from thousands of pieces of debris made a definitive prediction of a collision impossible, European officials said on Thursday.
"The 'catalogue' of objects and debris showed a possible approach between the paths of the two satellites but an approach doesn't necessarily mean a collision, and you would need more information to be certain," said Philippe Goudy, deputy director of the French space operations control center at Toulouse.
Reuters: U.S., Russia track satellite crash debris
By Guy Faulconbridge
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Showers of debris from the collision between a U.S. satellite and a defunct Russian military satellite forced scientists on Thursday into an urgent calculation of the chances of another crash in space.
Concern centers around the safety of the manned International Space Station while a Russian expert talked of the dangers posed by a crash involving one of the Soviet-era satellites powered by nuclear reactors.
Tuesday's crash, which Russian officials said took place at about 1700 GMT above northern Siberia, is the first collision between satellites that has been made public.
Reuters: Iridium network patched after collision in space
By Jim Wolf
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Iridium Satellite LLC said Friday it had patched a hole in its global telecommunications network caused by a collision in space with a defunct Russian military satellite.
The fix "addresses a significant portion of outages that customers otherwise might have experienced," said Liz DeCastro, a spokeswoman for closely held Iridium.
Details were not disclosed.
Wired: Lost in Space: 8 Weird Pieces of Space Junk
By Clara Moskowitz
Humans have ventured into space over the last 50 years, and all manner of junk has been left behind. From tiny bolts to whole space stations, people have discarded lots of stuff up there. Much of it eventually dies a fiery death as it falls through Earth's atmosphere, but some larger debris poses risks for astronauts and spacecraft that could collide with it. Here are some of the quirkier items left in space
Wired: Orbiting Carbon Lab to Provide Missing Climate Data
By Michael Wall
A NASA satellite launching later this month will measure the Earth's carbon dioxide levels in unprecedented detail, helping inform plans of attack against climate change.
Set to launch on February 23, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory will map the entire planet from 440 miles up, pinpointing where carbon dioxide is being emitted and where the greenhouse gas is being pulled from the air.
Identifying such sources and sinks will shed light on how carbon circulates from land to air to sea and back again — a process that remains poorly understood.
Wired: Planet-Hunting Space Telescope Readies for Launch
By Clara Moskowitz
When humans look into outer space and its amazing distant realms, sometimes all we really want to find is someplace like home.
Another planet like Earth, that is. Soon, a new NASA telescope mission called Kepler may finally make that happen.
Set to launch March 5 from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the $550 million Kepler telescope is designed to detect extrasolar planets that are the same size as Earth, orbiting around stars the same size as the sun, at a range similar to Earth's distance from the sun, and with orbits of about one year, like ours.
Reuters: NASA retargets Discovery launch for February 27
Reported by Irene Klotz at Cape Canaveral; editing by Todd Eastham
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) -- NASA managers on Friday delayed for a third time the launch date for space shuttle Discovery, now scheduled to lift off February 27 on an International Space Station construction mission.
Initially slated for launch this week, NASA wanted more time to review analysis and test results of potentially troublesome valves needed to keep the shuttle's fuel tank properly pressurized during the 8.5-minute ride into space.
"More time was needed to complete analysis and testing," said Allard Beutel, a spokesman with NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Evolution/Paleontology
MSNBC: Find sheds light on what life was like when dinosaurs dominated the planet
In just four years, the Isle of Wight, otherwise known as "Dinosaur Island," has yielded the remains of 48 new animal species, including eight new dinosaurs, six dino-era mammals, and many different types of lizards, frogs and salamanders.
Together, the finds shed light on what life was like when dinosaurs dominated the planet.
All of the fossils were discovered by a resident of the island, Steve Sweetman, who is a research associate with the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Portsmouth. His latest paper, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, concerns one of his rarest finds -- the remains of a mammal that scurried around on the dinosaur-trampled ground.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune: Tribe and Minnesota college agree on who gets the fossils
By BOB VON STERNBERG, Star Tribune
Concordia College in Moorhead and an Indian tribe have averted a showdown over dinosaur fossils, which have been raging for years across the Great Plains.
College officials have begun the process of returning fossils to officials of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, as the tribe attempts to catalogue and consolidate fossils that have been taken over the years from the reservation.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above two articles.
Wired: At 200, Darwin Evolves Beyond Evolution
By Brandon Keim
Two hundred years after Darwin's birth, the theory of evolution is still evolving — and finding relevance in realms far outside the biological.
Evolution is being scaled up to the level of populations, even whole ecosystems. Moreover, scientists say evolution is intertwined with other dynamics in ways science is just starting to understand.
"The process of evolution is fundamental to the universe," said Carl Woese, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign microbiologist and one of the first proponents of this newly revised evolutionary framework. "Biology is the most obvious manifestation of it."
Reuters: Cold's "family tree" may lead to cure: study
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers who mapped the DNA of more than 100 different cold viruses said on Thursday they discovered a shortcut in their life cycle, which may explain why they can inflict misery so quickly.
They also believe they may find ways to design drugs to fight the rhinoviruses, which use their single gene to move rapidly from person to person, causing symptoms that range from irritating sniffles to pneumonia.
Instead of designing one drug to cure the common cold, several may be needed because the virus mutates so efficiently, said Dr. Stephen Liggett of the University of Maryland medical school, who led the study published in the journal Science.
Reuters: Gene explosion set humans, great apes apart
Reporting by Maggie Fox; Editing by Xavier Briand
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An eruption of a poorly understood kind of genetic change set humans apart from great apes, and also sets chimps, gorillas and orangutans apart from monkeys, researchers reported on Wednesday.
Right before the great apes branched off from other apes and monkeys 10 million years ago, their DNA began to make explosive changes -- not classic mutations, but another change known as copy number variation, University of Washington geneticist Evan Eichler and colleagues found.
These changes in DNA sequences may help explain what makes humans -- and other apes -- unique, they report in the journal Nature.
Wired: Cooking Has Been Both Boon and Bane for Humans
By Michael Wall
CHICAGO — Raw-food devotees take note: Your diet is not in any way natural. Humans are as adapted to cooking our food as cows are to eating grass, or ticks are to sucking blood.
"Cooking is a human universal," said Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting here Friday. While cooking kills parasites and other pathogens, Wrangham believes this health benefit is not its primary contribution.
"The fundamental importance of cooking is that it provides increased sources of energy," he said.
And that boost may be what facilitated the leap in size between Homo erectus and modern Homo sapiens. But, cooking may also have helped some modern humans into an obesity epidemic.
Wired: What Makes Us Human? Neanderthal Genome Holds Clues
By Wired Science
CHIGAGO — The rough draft of the Neanderthal genome is complete.
Using 38,000-year-old bone fragments and new shotgun sequencing technology, researchers have sequenced 3.7 billion base pairs of Neanderthal DNA. That's more than the 3 billion base pairs expected in the final draft of the genome, but many of the snippets of genetic code are repeats. At this stage scientists have just 63 percent of the hominid genome completely sequenced.
Still, even with a rough draft, scientists can begin to isolate the genetic variations that are uniquely, irreducibly human.
Biodiversity
Wired: Global Shipping Industry Makes World Flat — Biologically
By Alexis Madrigal
CHICAGO — The global shipping industry hasn't just tied together the world's nations economically, but biologically, too.
The average Great Lakes port, such as Chicago, is only an average of two degrees of separation from 80 percent of the ports in the world, from Kuala Lumpur to Amsterdam, according to new analysis of more than 2 million ship movements presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting.
The biological upshot of that logistics reality is that the evidence on which scientists have based their studies of species (stretching back to the era of Charles Darwin) is being erased.
Reuters: Migrating songbirds get home fast in spring: study
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Migrating songbirds can get back up north to their breeding grounds in astonishingly quick time, with some traveling up to 360 miles a day, researchers reported on Thursday.
They designed tiny geo-locators that they fitted to purple martins and wood thrushes with lightweight backpacks to track them as they traveled between the United States and either Central America or Brazil.
Data from the birds they were able to find and trap showed that while they mosey south in the autumn, they race north in the spring, perhaps to snag the best nesting sites and mates, Bridget Stutchbury of the University of York in Toronto and colleagues reported.
Wired: New Wrinkly Dog Breed Makes Westminster Debut
By Brandon Keim
Champion Brando T Beefcake's ancestors fought bears and bulls. Possibly descended from Roman guard dogs, they defended their masters so fiercely that Adolf Hitler reportedly ordered them executed. Their judgment came in the form of survival.
On Tuesday morning, the 140-pound dogue de Bordeaux, fresh off a night's sleep at the posh New Yorker hotel, was judged in a very different way.
...
Joining the AKC's ranks marks a critical juncture in the breed's ongoing evolution. Like nearly every other breed, the dogue de Bordeaux (French for "Bordeaux mastiff") is a modern invention, separated by just a few hundred years from the handful of ancient dog types, themselves only recently derived from a few Far Eastern wolves.
Biotechnology/Health
Wired: Skin Cells Reprogrammed As Heart Cells Beat in a Dish
By Brandon Keim
Just in time for Valentine's Day, skin cells have been turned into heart tissue beating in a dish.
The tissue isn't ready for transplantation, but it's a moving proof-of-principle for induced pluripotency, which genetically reprograms adult cells into a near-embryonic state, capable of becoming almost any cell type.
"This is the first demonstration that human induced cells can form different types of heart cells in a dish," said study co-author Tim Kamp, a University of Wisconsin cell biologist.
Wired: First Near-Full Face Transplant a Success, So Far
By Alexis Madrigal
CHICAGO — The very first near-full human face transplant was detailed Friday by the surgeon who performed the procedure.
In December, plastic surgeon Maria Siemionow, after years of extensive research on mice and cadavers, transplanted almost 83 square inches of skin, with the muscles, bone, upper lip and nose still attached from an anonymous donor onto a young woman who the doctor said "did not have a midface" after she sustained traumatic injury.
After two months, the patient, whose name and likeness remain private, has experienced return of basic functions, like the sense of smell and the ability to drink from a cup. She has been discharged from the hospital and appears to be recovering.
Wired: Gut Bacteria Affect Almost Everything You Do
By Brandon Keim
Bacteria living symbiotically inside human bodies may have an unexpectedly profound and wide ranging effect on basic biological functions such as development, reproduction and immunity.
In a comparison of blood from germ-free and regular mice, researchers found large differences in molecules that affect just about everything involved in living.
"I expected to find a couple of differences," said study co-author Bill Wikoff, a Scripps Research Institute biophysicist. "When we came back with hundreds of changes, it was a big surprise."
Reuters: New technology sheds light on rise of blood cells
Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Maggie Fox
LONDON (Reuters) - German scientists using new imaging technology said on Wednesday they have watched a single cell give rise to blood cells, bolstering understanding of stem cells.
The findings could one day allow scientists to create blood in the laboratory that hospitals could give to patients needing transfusions, said Timm Schroeder of the Institute of Stem Cell research in Munich.
"What we are looking at is where blood really comes from during development," he said in a telephone interview. "Blood cells are born during the embryo development and we wanted to know from what type of cells they came from."
Climate/Environment
Reuters: Global warming seen worse than predicted
By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO (Reuters) - The climate is heating up far faster than scientists had predicted, spurred by sharp increases in greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries like China and India, a top climate scientist said on Saturday.
"The consequence of that is we are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously," Chris Field, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
Field said "the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious" than any of the climate predictions in the IPCC's fourth assessment report called "Climate Change 2007."
Reuters: Amazon forest may get drier, but survive warming
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO (Reuters) - Amazonian forests may be less vulnerable to dying off from global warming than feared because many projections underestimate rainfall, a study showed.
The report, by scientists in Britain, said Brazil and other nations in the region would also have to act to help avert any irreversible drying of the eastern Amazon, the region most at risk from climate change, deforestation and fires.
"The rainfall regime in eastern Amazonia is likely to shift over the 21st century in a direction that favors more seasonal forests rather than savannah," they wrote in this week's U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, released on Monday.
Geology/Geophysics
Reuters: Indonesian city grapples with quake threat
By Olivia Rondonuwu
PADANG, Indonesia (Reuters) - Remember the name Padang. Geologists say this Indonesian city of 900,000 people may one day be destroyed by a huge earthquake as it is in a seismic hot spot in one of the most quake-prone places in the world.
Given its dangerous location, experts say Padang must do more to protect its residents from a huge quake that could trigger a tsunami and wipe out this old port city on the west coast of the island of Sumatra.
"Padang sits right in front of the area with the greatest potential for an 8.9 magnitude earthquake," said Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, a geologist at the Indonesian Science Institute.
Psychology/Behavior
Wired: Think You'd Remember the Face of Your Torturer? Think Again
By Alexis Madrigal
CHICAGO — Imagine you've just been through a Guantanamo-style interrogation by a man in a prisoner-of-war camp. You're sitting in an isolation cell, when another of your captors bursts in the door, brandishing a photo of a man, and asking, "Did your interrogator give you anything to eat?" The man leaves, but later as your ordeal is ending, you're asked to pick out your interrogator from nine faces.
Surely, his image would be burned into your memory, right?
Wrong.
Reuters: Words give brain handle on feelings: U.S. researcher
By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Brain scientists are starting to understand something poets, songwriters and diarists have long known: putting feelings into words helps ease the mind.
"It is a pretty well-established finding that this occurs, but we don't know why," Matthew Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, said on Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
"When you put feelings into words, you are turning on the same regions in the brain that are involved in emotional self-control," Lieberman said.
Reuters: Babies who gesture have bigger vocabularies: study
By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Babies who use many gestures to communicate when they are 14 months-old have much larger vocabularies when they start school than those who don't, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
They said babies with wealthier, better-educated parents tend to gesture more and this may help explain why some children from low-income families fare less well in school.
"When children enter school, there is a large socioeconomic gap in their vocabularies," said the University of Chicago's Meredith Rowe, whose study appears in the journal Science.
Reuters: Study ties passive smoking to dementia
Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Maggie Fox and Jon Boyle
LONDON (Reuters) - Passive smoking appears to significantly raise a person's risk of dementia and other forms of cognitive problems, British and U.S. researchers said on Friday.
Their report published in the British Medical Journal found a 44 percent increased risk for people exposed to high levels of second-hand smoke, and is the first large-scale study to show the association between the two.
"Our results suggest that inhaling other people's smoke may damage the brain, impair cognitive functions such as memory, and make dementia more likely," David Llewellyn of Britain's University of Cambridge, who led the study, said in a statement.
Reuters: Videogames seen good for children
By Sarah Luehrs
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Videogames can be good for children, encouraging creativity and cooperation, a European Union report concluded Wednesday which ran counter to the violent reputation of some titles.
In conclusions that may either surprise or reassure parents of game addicts, the study by the European Parliament Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection found a number of benefits and no definitive link to violent behavior.
"Videogames are in most cases not dangerous and can even contribute to the development of important skills," said Toine Manders, the Dutch liberal lawmaker who drafted the report.
Reuters: No stomach for market turmoil? Thank your genes
Reporting by Maggie Fox, editing by Will Dunham and Xavier Briand
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - No stomach for the ups and downs of the financial market? Or maybe you lost everything in the global economic downturn? Genes important for mood and risk-taking likely played a clear role, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
They found surprisingly clear-cut links between two genes and the willingness of people to gamble with money.
The study, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, supports others that point to brain chemicals and their roles in financial risk-taking.
Archeology/Anthropology
MSNBC: Human hair found in prehistoric hyena poop
By Jennifer Viegas
Hairs that likely belonged to humans living 195,000 to 257,000 years ago in Africa have been identified in fossilized brown hyena dung, according to a new study that describes the first non-bony material in the early human fossil record.
Until now, the oldest known human hairs were from a 9,000-year-old Chinchorro mummy from Arica, northern Chile. This latest discovery, made at Gladysvale cave, South Africa, exceeds the mummy's age by about 200,000 years.
The findings, which have been accepted for publication in the Journal of Archaeological Science, further suggest that early humans faced tough competition from carnivores that either attacked the individuals outright, or scavenged on their dead.
Long Island Business News: Miller: For one small eastern spot, a whole lot to dig into
by Jeff Miller
Charles DeSousa wants to build a small retirement house for his mother in Montauk, on a shy-acre with some wetlands near Fort Hill Cemetery. But there’s a problem: Somebody else got there earlier – like 5,000 years earlier.
The site was "a base camp for hunters and gatherers during two time periods, the Middle Archaic period, 5,000 years ago, and the Late Woodland period, 1,000 years ago," according to a recent story in The East Hampton Press. This has been determined by a series of town-required archeological surveys over the last two years at a cost of $8,800, billed to DeSousa.
The digs unearthed a fire pit and artifacts. If DeSousa insists on going ahead with building, he’ll have to have everything exhumed at a cost that could hit $100,000.
Not surprisingly, that’s a deal-breaker.
Christian Science Monitor: Iraq: No haven for ancient world's landmarks
By Jane Arraf
Nimrud, Iraq - The carved stone reliefs lined the entrance to a great palace, a testament to one of the most powerful kings the world has known. The ancient works of art have stood for 3,000 years but for the past 20 they've been threatened by the lack of a corrugated steel roof.
One of the prizes of archaeology, the excavated palace of Ashurnasirpal at Nimrud, is in peril. The World Monuments Fund lists Nimrud as one of its most endangered sites.
Exposed to the elements, the reliefs are quickly deteriorating, experts say. Without basic maintenance, they will decay further and modern society will lose an important portal into the life of one of the great warrior kings and the beginnings of civilization.
BBC: German guile won Queen Nefertiti
Newly published documents show how a German archaeologist used trickery to smuggle home a fabulous sculpture of the Egyptian queen, Nefertiti.
The archaeologist, Ludwig Borchardt, listed the bust of Queen Nefertiti among his finds in Egypt in 1913.
But he described it as a worthless piece of gypsum and hid it in a box.
Cape Cod Online: Egypt unveils new ancient mummy discovery
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
SAQQARA, Egypt - Illuminated only by torches and camera lights, Egyptian laborers used crowbars and picks Wednesday to lift the lid off a 2,600-year-old limestone sarcophagus, exposing - for the first time since it was sealed in antiquity - a perfectly preserved mummy.
The mummy, wrapped in dark-stained canvas, is part of Egypt's latest archaeological discovery of a burial chamber 36 feet below ground at the ancient necropolis of Saqqara. The find, made three weeks ago, was publicly announced Monday and shown to reporters for the first time Wednesday.
Azzaman.com: Bridge built by Alexander the Great found north of Mosul
By Jareer Mohammed
Road construction workers have come across an old bridge Alexander the Great had it built after conquering Iraq, an Iraqi archaeologist says.
Archaeologist Omer Sharif, who inspected the ancient bridge, said he was certain of its antiquity and attribution.
"The bridge dates to 330 B.C. and to the reign of Alexander the Great," he said.
BBC: Dig unearths 13th century ceramic
A rare ceramic face-mask jug dating back to the 13th century has been uncovered at a building site in Rothesay in Argyll.
The find came after a house builder commissioned an archaeological dig on the site of the former Rothesay Council Chambers and Sheriff Court buildings.
BBC: Aztec 'warrior' mass grave found
Archaeologists have found a mass grave in Mexico City with at least 49 human skeletons dating from Spain's conquest of the Aztecs in the 16th Century.
Experts say the site is unusual as the Aztec skeletons are carefully laid out and bear marks of European traditions.
The find was made in the Tlatelolco area of Mexico City, where the Indians made a last stand against the Spanish.
Museum of Underwater Archeology: CLUE Discovers Two Well Preserved Shipwrecks in Lake Erie in 2008
The Cleveland Underwater Explorers, Inc. (CLUE) completed another very successful field season in 2008, discovering and documenting new shipwrecks in Lake Erie and performing various public outreach activities and presentations.
Two newly discovered shipwrecks were announced at a press conference held at the Great Lakes Historical Society (GLHS) in Vermilion, Ohio, on October 30, 2008. The three-masted schooner Riverside was located in 75 feet (23 meters) of water 25 miles (40 km) north of Cleveland. This schooner sank during the great storm of October 14-15, 1893, which was the remnant of a tropical hurricane that sank or stranded many ships on Lake Erie. The Riverside and its crew of seven was lost while carrying a load of limestone between Kelley’s Island, Ohio, and Tonawanda, New York. The wreck is remarkably well-preserved with a good portion of the rigging and deck hardware present. A pre-disturbance survey was performed on the wreck, the entire site was documented with video and photos, and a preliminary site plan was created.
Boston Globe: Archaeologists search for unbaptized babies' grave
By Shawn Pogatchnik
DUBLIN—Archaeologists began searching Tuesday for unmarked mass graves containing hundreds of unbaptized babies and infants buried by the Catholic Church on the edge of a Belfast cemetery.
Unlike many other Christian churches, the Catholic Church teaches that baptism is essential for a soul to enter heaven and therefore the ritual must take place as near to birth as possible. For decades, newborns and infants who die before baptism were deemed ineligible for salvation and were not buried on consecrated, or holy, ground.
Individual priests in Belfast began loosening that restriction in the 1980s as families demanded the right to bury their youngest loved ones in marked family plots.
Telegraph (UK): Archaeologists lose their jobs as recession bites
By Stephen Adams, Arts Correspondent
By the end of the year around one in five of the country's 7,000 archaeologists are expected to have lost their jobs, experts believe.
The profession has expanded rapidly in recent years thanks to legislation that forced developers to pay for digs.
But now jobs are going because so many construction projects are being put on hold.
In the last quarter of 2008, 345 lost their jobs, according to to the Institute for Archaeologists.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above articles.
Physics
Wired: LHC to Begin Collisions in Fall... Right?
By Alexis Madrigal
The Large Hadron Collider will begin blasting apart atoms starting in October, scientists at CERN confirmed today.
The much-ballyhooed "most complex machine in the world" will officially restart in September, going through a series of tests, before it progresses to actual science experiments that could (all together now) provide new understanding about the nature of dark matter and the first few moments after the Big Bang.
Reuters: Physics lab allays Angels & Demons antimatter fear
By Laura MacInnis
GENEVA (Reuters) - The European physics laboratory that reassured us it wouldn't destroy the Earth in a "Big Bang" experiment last year is now telling people not to fret about antimatter.
Physicists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) are keen to separate fact from fiction in Hollywood's upcoming adaptation of the Dan Brown novel Angels & Demons, in which a secret society tries to annihilate the Vatican with antimatter stolen from the lab on the Swiss-French border.
CERN spokesman James Gillies said that while director Ron Howard "tried to get the science as right as is possible in the film," some aspects of the fictional plot are unavoidably fantastical.
Chemistry
Wired: Latest Celebrity Rant: Conan Goes Off on Boron
by Aaron Rowe
When a reporter at the New York Times made a little mistake in an article about Boron, Conan O'Brien was furious. On his show, Late Night, he launched into a hilarious rant about the fifth element.
Last Monday, Kenneth Chang described a new type of Boron crystal that was discovered by Artem Oganov and his team of geoscientists. But the seasoned science journalist got one detail wrong: Including the newly discovered substance, the element can take on four different forms, but Chang had incorrectly stated that there are only three.
The next time the N.Y. Times screws up a political story, go ahead and call them a bunch of "Boron Morons." You'll feel better.
Energy
Wired: Biggest Solar Deal Ever Announced — We're Talking Gigawatts
By Alexis Madrigal
The largest series of solar installations in history, more than 1,300 megawatts, is planned for the desert outside Los Angeles, according to a new deal between the utility Southern California Edison and solar power plant maker, BrightSource.
The momentous deal will deliver more electricity than even the largest nuclear plant, spread out among seven facilities, the first of which will start up in 2013. When fully operational, the companies say the facility will provide enough electricity to power 845,000 homes — more than exist in San Francisco — though estimates like that are notoriously squirrely.
The technology isn't the familiar photovoltaics — the direct conversion of sunlight into electricity — but solar thermal power, which concentrates the sun's rays to create steam in a boiler and spin a turbine.
Wired: Google Smart Meter App Not Ready for Finals
By Alexis Madrigal
The Googles are coming! The Googles are coming!
Monday night, Google announced it is developing a software utility, PowerMeter, that allows you to track your energy usage. By communicating with an as-yet undeveloped set of hardware devices, the smart meter software could provide you with granular, real-time data about your energy usage.
In the tech world, everybody used to break into hives at the slightest hint that the all-knowing, all-seeing Google was going to enter their business, providing free tools and doing everything better. But slowly people realized that Google isn't the best company to do everything. They don't always win, and they may well not win here either.
Reuters: Can algae save the world - again?
By Stuart McDill
PLYMOUTH, England (Reuters) - Can algae save the world again? The microscopic green plants cleaned up the earth's atmosphere millions of years ago and scientists hope they can do it now by helping remove greenhouse gases and create new oil reserves.
In the distant past, algae helped turn the earth's then inhospitable atmosphere into one that could support modern life through photosynthesis, which plants use to turn carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugars and oxygen.
Some of the algae sank to sea or lake beds and slowly became oil. "All we're doing is turning the clock back," says Steve Skill, a biochemist at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
Science Daily: Hamsters On Treadmills Provide Electricity Through Use Of Nanogenerators
ScienceDaily (Feb. 14, 2009) — Could hamsters help solve the world's energy crisis? Probably not, but a hamster wearing a power-generating jacket is doing its own small part to provide a new and renewable source of electricity.
And using the same nanotechnology, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have also generated electrical current from a tapping finger – moving the users of BlackBerry devices, cell phones and other handhelds one step closer to powering them with their own typing.
"Using nanotechnology, we have demonstrated ways to convert even irregular biomechanical energy into electricity," said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regent's professor in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. "This technology can convert any mechanical disturbance into electrical energy."
Hat/Tip to palantir for the above story.
Science, Space, Environment, and Energy Policy
Reuters: U.S. stimulus bill likely to revive green power
By Matt Daily - Analysis
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. renewable energy sector, which has been hit hard by the banking crisis, will get a new lifeline from the economic stimulus package that is expected to pass the U.S. Congress on Friday.
The flow of new wind and solar projects has slowed to a dribble in the past few months, forcing some solar companies to lay off workers and others to temporarily idle production lines as banks shut off capital flows to the industry.
"I think this is very, very helpful and productive," Rick Gittleman, head of law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld's renewable energy practice, said of the measures in the stimulus package.
Reuters: Space traffic congestion needs money, technology
By Andrea Shalal-Esa - Analysis
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The dramatic collision of U.S. and Russian satellites is the latest in a series of orbital events that highlight an urgent need for better monitoring of the growing traffic in space.
Tuesday's crash will increase calls for additional Pentagon spending to track space debris and satellites, U.S. space experts said. It also may give new impetus to a drive to set international standards for companies and governments operating in space that may include equipping new satellites with sensors or mandatory propulsion systems so they can be moved to ease traffic congestion.
China's anti-satellite test in January 2007 sparked concerns about the U.S. ability to quickly determine if any problems were caused by natural phenomenon, technical malfunctions, debris strikes, or even enemy attacks.
Reuters: Satellite crash poses new political risk
By Luke Baker
LONDON (Reuters) - The collision between a U.S. and a Russian satellite over Siberia may have been accidental and the first of its kind, but experts say more crashes will inevitably occur and could have geopolitical consequences.
"This is an event that really makes us realize that things are not so straightforward as we originally thought," said Francisco Diego, a senior research fellow in physics and astronomy at University College London.
"I couldn't put a number on the probability of this happening again, but now that it has happened, it changes things a lot and it becomes a concern."
Reuters: More data sharing urged to avoid satellite crashes
By Andrea Shalal-Esa
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tuesday's collision of two satellites in space may not be the last unless big changes are made in the way government and commercial satellite operators share data, an expert on satellite orbits warned on Friday.
"Just because it took 50 years for it to happen doesn't mean it's going to be 50 years before the next one," said retired U.S. Air Force Colonel T.S. Kelso, who was the first director of the Air Force Space Command Space Analysis Center and is advising Iridium Satellite LLC, whose communications satellite was destroyed in the crash.
Kelso runs a website dedicated to tracking satellites and debris for the private Center for Space Standards & Innovation and has developed a sophisticated computer program that provides regular information when satellites are going to be passing close by each other or space debris.
Reuters: France defends GM ban after report says safe in food
By Sybille de La Hamaide
PARIS (Reuters) - A report by the French food safety agency that says genetically modified maize is safe for humans does not call France's ban on the crop into question, Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said on Thursday.
Borloo's statement came in response to an article in the Le Figaro daily, which said the agency, Afssa, did not see any health risks to the insect-resistant MON 810 maize developed by U.S. biotech giant Monsanto.
MON 810 is the only genetically modified crop approved in the European Union but France suspended its cultivation last year, invoking a so-called safeguard clause against the European Commission's authorization.
Science Education
Wired: 10 Awesome Summer Internships for Science Students
By Aaron Rowe
If you're a college student thinking about becoming a scientist, now is the time to apply for summer internships. Aside from studying hard, the most important thing that you can do for yourself is get some research experience.
The National Science Foundation sponsors hundreds of summer programs, which allow sophomores and juniors to get their first taste of real labwork. Most of them last ten weeks and pay more than 3,000 dollars to cover your living expenses.
Science Reporting
Wired: Wired Science Reports Live From World's Largest Popular Science Conference
By Alexis Madrigal
CHICAGO — Science moves in little steps, advancing by the accumulated weight of thousands of individuals in fields as narrow as a carbon nanotube.
That can make your average science conference a little dull, as the latest incremental advances in one type of treatment in one study on a single type of cancer cell are presented. The American Association for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting, however, is not that kind of conference.
The big issues take center stage, at least those that scientists can solve. Liquids maybe, liquidity, not so much. This year, origins of all types will be in focus: what formed our planet, how life began, where humans became humans, and why we started to talk.
Science is Cool
Reuters: World celebrates Darwin's 200th anniversary
By Peter Griffiths and Paul Casciato
CAMBRIDGE, England (Reuters) - His beetle cabinet is back in his old college rooms, his home is a national treasure and the islands that led Charles Darwin to evolutionary theory are under threat from tourism two centuries after his birth.
Celebrations for the 200th anniversary of the birth of the man whose book "On The Origin of Species" transformed how we see the natural world have captivated fellow scientists, royalty, religious leaders, historians, presidents, conservationists and tourist officials around the world.
David Attenborough, whose television programs on the natural world have been watched by millions around the planet, provided a simple explanation for the draw of the bicentenary.
"Without Darwin, very little in the natural world makes sense," Attenborough told Reuters. "Darwin turned natural history into a science."