On This Day in History
Reagan Takes Oath As 40th President; Promises An 'Era Of National Renewal'
By Ron Cowen
Washington, Jan. 20 -- Ronald Wilson Reagan of California, promising "an era of national renewal," became the 40th President of the United States today as 52 Americans held hostage in Iran were heading toward freedom.
The hostages, whose 14 months of captivity had been a central focus of the Presidential contest last year took off from Teheran in two Boeing 727 airplanes at 12:25 P.M., Eastern standard time, the very moment that Mr. Reagan was concluding his solemn Inaugural Address at the United States Capitol. |
Science News
Tevatron to shut down in September
Lack of funds precludes continued operation of most powerful U.S. collider By Ron Cowen
The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron will shut down by the end of September, the U.S. Department of Energy has announced, dashing hopes that the 25-year-old atom smasher in Batavia, Ill., might win a transatlantic race to find the most sought-after elementary particle in high-energy physics.
Fermilab received the news from the Department of Energy on January 10 that the agency could not come up with an annual $35 million to keep the Tevatron running until 2014. The department’s advisory panel on high energy physics had recommended that the Tevatron operate for an additional three years after the European consortium CERN announced in early 2010 that its more powerful Large Hadron Collider would close down during all of 2012 for repairs. (It’s now likely that the collider will shut down in 2013 instead, a CERN official says.)
Electrical problems had already postponed by a year the opening of the Large Hadron Collider, until the fall of 2009. That delay, along with the future year-long shutdown, had seemed to give a leg up to the Tevatron in its search for the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would explain the origin of mass in subatomic particles. |
Peer review: Trial by Twitter
Blogs and tweets are ripping papers apart within days of publication, leaving researchers unsure how to react. Apoorva Mandavilli
"Scientists discover keys to long life," proclaimed The Wall Street Journal headline on 1 July last year. "Who will live to be 100? Genetic test might tell," said National Public Radio a day later.
These and hundreds of similarly enthusiastic headlines were touting a paper in Science1 in which researchers claimed to have identified a set of genes that could predict human longevity with 77% accuracy — a finding with potentially huge implications for medicine, health policy and the economy.
But even as the popular media was trumpeting the finding, other researchers were taking to the web to criticize the paper's methodology. "We expect that most of the results of this study will not have the same longevity as its participants," sniped a blog posted by researchers at the personal genomics company 23andMe, based in Mountain View, California. |
Dino-era sex riddle solved by new fossil find
The discovery of an ancient fossil, nicknamed 'Mrs T', has allowed scientists for the first time to sex pterodactyls – flying reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs between 220-65 million years ago. Provided by University of Leicester
Pterodactyls featured prominently in Spielberg's Jurassic Park III and are a classic feature of many dinosaur movies where they are often depicted as giant flying reptiles with a crest.
The discovery of a flying reptile fossilised together with an egg in Jurassic rocks (about 160 million years old) in China provides the first direct evidence for gender in these extinct fliers. This fossil shows that females were crestless, solving the long-standing problem of what some pterosaurs did with their spectacular head crests: showy displays by males.
The find was made by an international team of researchers from the Universities of Leicester, Lincoln and the Geological Institute, Beijing. Details of the unique new find are published today (January 21) in the journal Science.
David Unwin, a palaeobiologist in the Department of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, was part of the research team that studied the fossil. He said:
"Pterosaurs, flying reptiles, also known as pterodactyls, dominated the skies in the Mesozoic Era, the age of dinosaurs, 220-65 million years ago. Many pterosaurs have head crests. In the most spectacular cases these can reach five times the height of the skull. Scientists have long suspected that these crests were used for some kind of display or signalling and may have been confined to males, while females were crestless. But, in the absence of any direct evidence for gender this idea remained speculative and crested and crestless forms were often separated into completely different species." |
Study marks spooky step towards quantum computers
By Kate Kelland
LONDON, Jan. 19, 2011 (Reuters) — Scientists have moved a step closer to creating ultra-fast quantum computers by generating 10 billion bits of quantum entanglement in silicon for the first time.
The achievement in silicon, the basis of the computer chip, has important implications for integration with existing technology, according to a team from Britain, Japan, Canada and Germany whose study was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
"Creating 10 billion entangled pairs in silicon with high fidelity is an important step forward for us," said John Morton of Britain's Oxford University, who led the team.
"We now need to deal with the challenge of coupling these pairs together to build a scalable quantum computer in silicon." |
Technology News
Print your own flute
Sandrine Ceurstemont, video editor
Cheap 3D printers can now quickly make plastic replicas of almost anything, from an insect's wings to copies of their own parts. But now Amit Zoran and his team from the MIT Media Lab have used one to recreate the intricate design of a flute (see video above).
They started by making a digital model of the instrument based on a metal flute but with adaptations to account for the new materials used, and the level of precision possible, with 3D printing. The model was then sent to a 3D printer which constructed the flute in four parts over a period of 15 hours. It squirts out three different plastic composites developed by Objet, the company that created the printer they used. Once the printing was complete, the researchers just had to put together the four parts and manually add springs.
When tested by a flautist, the plastic flute was given the thumbs up for sound. |
Verizon challenges FCC's net neutrality rules
Verizon Communications Inc. on Thursday filed a legal challenge to new federal regulations that prohibit broadband providers from interfering with Internet traffic flowing over their networks. By JOELLE TESSLER
In a filing in federal appeals court in the District of Columbia, Verizon argues that the Federal Communications Commission overstepped its authority in adopting the new "network neutrality" rules last month.
The rules prohibit phone and cable companies from favoring or discriminating against Internet content and services - including online calling services such as Skype and Internet video services such as Netflix, which in many cases compete with services sold by companies like Verizon.
The FCC's three Democrats adopted the rules over the opposition of the agency's two Republicans just before Christmas. Republicans in Congress, who now control the House, have vowed to try to block them from taking effect. They argue that the rules amount to unnecessary regulation that will discourage the phone and cable companies from investing in their networks. |
3-D means headaches to many, yet companies push on
From Hollywood studios to Japanese TV makers, powerful business interests are betting 3-D will be the future of entertainment, despite a major drawback: It makes millions of people uncomfortable or sick. By PETER SVENSSON
Optometrists say as many as one in four viewers have problems watching 3-D movies and TV, either because 3-D causes tiresome eyestrain or because the viewer has problems perceiving depth in real life. In the worst cases, 3-D makes people queasy, leaves them dizzy or gives them headaches.
Researchers have begun developing more lifelike 3-D displays that might address the problems, but they're years or even decades from being available to the masses.
That isn't deterring the entertainment industry, which is aware of the problem yet charging ahead with plans to create more movies and TV shows in 3-D. Jeff Katzenberg, CEO of Dreamworks Animation SKG Inc., calls 3-D "the greatest innovation that's happened for the movie theaters and for moviegoers since color."
Theater owners including AMC Entertainment Inc. and TV makers such as Panasonic Corp. are spending more than a billion dollars to upgrade theaters and TVs for 3-D. A handful of satellite and cable channels are already carrying 3-D programming; ESPN just announced its 3-D network will begin broadcasting 24 hours a day next month. |
CEO shake-up at Google: Page replaces Schmidt
by Tom Krazit
Google shook up its ruling triumvirate today, announcing that CEO Eric Schmidt would be taking the role of executive chairman, while co-founder Larry Page will become CEO. Sergey Brin, who has also shared power with the two others, will work on "strategic projects," Google said.
Schmidt, who was hired by the co-founders to be Google's CEO in 2001, will focus on external partnerships and business deals starting on April 4, when Page will take over the day-to-day management role. Schmidt said in a blog post that Page, "in my clear opinion, is ready to lead."
On a conference call originally scheduled to discuss Google's fourth-quarter results, Schmidt said "I'm going to get a chance to work on the things I'm most interested in," which will include talking to customers, partners, and the government regulators breathing down his company's neck.
Page, 38, will actually become Google's third CEO, though he held the role during the first few years of the company's efforts. He'll be tasked with making sure Google toes the line internally and said several times during the call that he's excited to lead Google at a time when computing is still a relatively new way of life for many people. |
Environmental News
What's the carbon footprint of war?
Ferris Jabr, reporter
In the past few years, some researchers have explored whether warfare and societal collapse might be explained in part by swings in climate.
A 2007 study found that periods of cold weather preceded 12 of 15 major conflicts in China's ancient dynasties. The frost would have created food shortages, the study suggested, which would have inspired rebellions and made communities more vulnerable to invasion. More recently, a study in Science argued that dramatic shifts in climate would have affected agriculture, contributing to the fall of the Roman Empire.
But what about the opposite effect? Can humanity's skirmishes change the climate?
Yes, says a new study in The Holocene by Julia Pongratz of the Carnegie Institution for Science. It all comes down to a trade-off between people and trees: when a brutal war or devastating plague significantly reduces a human population, forests have the chance to re-grow and absorb carbon dioxide, mitigating the greenhouse effect. |
Black market steals half a million pollution permits
by Fred Pearce
Nearly half a million pollution permits were stolen from a Czech carbon bank this week. The event put the spotlight on an emerging black market for the right to pollute the planet, and shut down much of the European carbon trading scheme
The stolen permits would allow a company to pollute the atmosphere with almost half a million tonnes of carbon. Known as European Union Allowances (EUAs), they are distributed by the EU as part of its carbon trading scheme, set up to help the bloc of nations meet its Kyoto protocol targets.
Major companies can emit only as much carbon dioxide as their allocated EUAs allow. If they want to emit more, they must buy spare carbon permits from others. The pilfered permits could thus enter a black market in permits.
On Tuesday, a Prague-based carbon bank called Blackstone Global Ventures announced that someone had hacked into the Czech national carbon registry and transfered 475,000 EUAs from its account. Each EUA represents a tonne of carbon and the total value of the stolen permits was around €7 million. |
Study shows plants moved downhill, not up, in warming world
In a paper published today in the journal Science, a University of California, Davis, researcher and his co-authors challenge a widely held assumption that plants will move uphill in response to warmer temperatures. Provided by UC Davis
Between 1930 and 2000, instead of colonizing higher elevations to maintain a constant temperature, many California plant species instead moved downhill an average of 260 feet, said Jonathan Greenberg, an assistant project scientist at the UC Davis Center for Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing.
"While the climate warmed significantly in this period, there was also more precipitation. These wetter conditions are allowing plants to exist in warmer locations than they were previously capable of," Greenberg said.
Many forecasts say climate change will cause a number of plants and animals to migrate to new ranges or become extinct. That research has largely been based on the assumption that temperature is the dominant driver of species distributions. However, Greenberg said the new study reveals that other factors, such as precipitation, may be more important than temperature in defining the habitable range of these species.
The findings could have global relevance, because many locations north of 45 degrees latitude (which includes the northernmost United States, virtually all of Canada and Russia, and most of Europe) have had increased precipitation in the past century, and global climate models generally predict that trend will continue, the authors said. |
CO2 Ocean Sequestration
Andy Soos, ENN
Carbon sequestration is "The process of removing carbon from the atmosphere and depositing it in a reservoir." When carried out deliberately, this may also be referred to as carbon dioxide removal, which is a form of geoengineering. The term carbon sequestration may also be used to refer to the process of carbon capture and storage, where CO2 is removed from flue gases, such as on power stations, before being stored in underground reservoirs. The term may also refer to natural biogeochemical cycling of carbon between the atmosphere and reservoirs, such as by chemical weathering of rocks. Using seawater and calcium to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) in a natural gas power plant's flue stream, and then pumping the resulting calcium bicarbonate in the sea, could be beneficial to the oceans' marine life or states a new research report.
The oceans contain around 36,000 gigatons of carbon, mostly in the form of bicarbonate ion (over 90%, with most of the remainder being carbonate). |
Medical News
Tallying the caloric cost of an all-nighter
The body conserves energy during sleep, more so after missing zzz's By Tina Hesman Saey
Staying up all night clearly taxes the body, but scientists have only now added up the exact bill. By measuring the actual number of calories the body expends to fuel an all-nighter versus a good night’s sleep, researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder calculate that a full night of sleep helps the body conserve as much energy as is in a glass of warm milk.
Missing a night of sleep forces the body to burn about an extra 161 calories than it would have during eight hours of sleep (not counting what’s used in moving around while awake), but it’s no weight-loss miracle: The body tries to make up for the deficit by saving more energy than usual the next day and night, researchers report in the January Journal of Physiology.
The measurements, the first to put precise numbers on how much total energy people use in a 24-hour period while asleep, awake or recovering from a night of sleep deprivation, help bolster a theory that an important function of sleep is to save energy (SN: 10/24/09, p. 16). |
Make anti-vaccine parents pay higher premiums
By Rahul Parikh
(Walnut Creek, California CNN) -- Evidence disputing any link between autism and vaccines has been gathering for a decade. The anti-vaccine movement's lynchpin, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, has been shown to be nothing more than a grifter in a lab coat, with the prestigious British Medical Journal calling his work "an elaborate fraud."
Two new books, "Deadly Choices" by Paul Offit and "The Panic Virus" by Seth Mnookin, detail the sordid story of the anti-vaccine movement.
Given that, it's hard for me to believe that some parents still refuse to vaccinate their children. But they do, frightened by the rants and raves of anti-vaccine fundamentalists such as Jenny McCarthy, who can effortlessly get on "Oprah" or any other TV talk show to advance what is nothing short of a myth.
It's that fiction and the fear it incites that has challenged and frustrated pediatricians like me for 10 years. I don't foresee any quick shift in the trend among affluent, highly educated older parents against childhood vaccines. As Offit often points out, it's much harder to unscare people once they've been scared. McCarthy has it easy. We doctors have to do the hard part. |
Warning signs from a troubled mind: What parents should do
By Madison Park and Elizabeth Landau
(CNN) -- After the shooting that left six dead in Tucson, Arizona, last Saturday, a portrait emerged of alleged gunman Jared Lee Loughner as an angry, disturbed young man.
His outbursts frightened teachers and classmates at Aztec Middle College, from which he was suspended for behavioral issues in September. He alienated people, wrote incoherent, raging diatribes and disturbed classmates with comments like "why don't we just strap bombs to babies?" according to records and CNN interviews.
In hindsight, the escalation seems obvious. How could such warning signs have been ignored?
The reality, however, is that the line between unusual behavior and someone being a true threat is murky. And there aren't many options to detain people who exhibit disturbing behavior but have not committed a crime, experts said.
While Loughner's background check revealed brushes with the law, it did not set off alarm bells for authorities. |
Metal Tongue Piercings Linked to Raised Infection Risks
Study found plastic studs harbored less bacteria HealthDay
WEDNESDAY, Jan. 19 (HealthDay News) -- If you're considering tongue piercing as a form of self-expression, know that new research suggests that whether the stud used is metal or plastic makes a difference when it comes to chances of infection.
Stainless steel studs may collect more bacteria than plastic studs, potentially increasing the risk of infection and other complications, a team of European researchers reports.
"Consumers should avoid stainless steel and titanium studs in favor of [plastic], not only because of bacteria and a potentially higher risk of local infection of the piercing channel, but also because of the risk of tooth chipping and gum recession," study author Dr. Ines Kapferer, of Innsbruck Medical University in Austria, said in a statement.
Tooth chipping and receding gums, as well as gum disease, are some of the long-term complications associated with tongue piercing, prior research shows. Early complications include pain, swelling, prolonged bleeding and swallowing difficulties. What's more, the mouth contains so many bacteria that the piercing procedure itself may increase the risk of infection, one of the most common piercing complications. |
Space News
NASA goes for Glory
Mission to monitor solar energy and aerosols set to join 'A-Train' of climate satellites. Jeff Tollefson
NASA is preparing to launch an environmental monitoring satellite designed to maintain and bolster a continuous record of solar energy, while providing new details about aerosols, which reflect and absorb the Sun's rays passing through the atmosphere.
The Glory mission is scheduled to launch on 23 February aboard a four-stage Taurus XL 3110 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Once in space, Glory will join the Afternoon Constellation, or A-Train — an ensemble of satellites studying changes in Earth's climate system.
The A-Train, which orbits some 700 kilometres above Earth, travels at a speed of more than 24,000 kilometres per hour — managing a full orbit every 100 minutes to map the Earth roughly once every 16 days. There are currently four satellites in the ensemble. |
Missing part delays space mission
Schedule slips for European-led effort to blaze a trail for gravitational-wave detection. Eugenie Samuel Reich
For Stefano Vitale, a principal investigator on the LISA Pathfinder mission, the situation is excruciating. Nearly all the instruments for the €300-million (US$400-million) spacecraft have been delivered for what was originally to have been a launch this year. But delays have pushed that target to 2013 and possibly later, with everything now held up by a small but crucial component. "All the rest is waiting for one part. It's heartbreaking," says Vitale, a physicist at the University of Trento in Italy.
It is a rougher-than-anticipated start for a mission that was created to find obstacles. LISA Pathfinder is a European-led test of the technology needed to run the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), an ambitious effort to detect gravitational waves from sources in the distant Universe. Scientists hope that LISA can achieve this by measuring the precise separations between three pairs of masses free-floating inside three spacecraft positioned 5 million kilometres apart. The technical challenge along with the estimated cost of LISA (€1 billion to €2 billion) made a precursor mission a necessity. If LISA Pathfinder encounters significant problems it could sow doubts about the overall effort. |
"Suicide" Comet Storm Hits Sun—Bigger Sun-Kisser Coming?
Andrew Fazekas
A recent storm of small comets that pelted the sun could herald the coming a much bigger icy visitor, astronomers say.
Since its launch in 1995, NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, orbiter has captured pictures of 2,000 comets as they've flown past the sun.
Most of these comets are so-called sungrazers, relatively tiny comets whose orbits bring them so near the sun that they are often vaporized within hours of discovery. (See a picture of a sungrazer spied in October.)
The sun-watching telescope usually picks up one sungrazer every few days. But between December 13 and 22, SOHO saw more than two dozen sungrazers appear and disintegrate.
Seeing "25 comets in just ten days, that's unprecedented," Karl Battams, of the United States Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "It was crazy!"
According to Battams and colleagues, the comet swarm could be forerunner fragments from a much larger parent comet that may be headed along a similar path. And such a large icy body coming so near the sun would result in a spectacular sky show. |
NASA sets final space shuttle mission for June 28
Despite budget uncertainties, NASA on Thursday announced plans to send the space shuttle Atlantis on the final mission of the US program June 28, after which the famed fleet will be retired. (c) 2011 AFP
"It is NASA's intent to fly the mission with orbiter Atlantis carrying the Raffaello multipurpose logistics module to deliver supplies, logistics and spare parts to the International Space Station," a statement said.
President Barack Obama has signed a bill authorizing NASA to conduct the third and final mission, but the US space agency's budget for 2011 remains to be approved so the shuttle flight depends on congressional authorization of extra funds.
The Atlantis flight would be the shuttle program's 135th and final mission to space.
The shuttle Discovery is scheduled to launch on February 24 and the shuttle Endeavour is set for takeoff on April 19. |
Odd News
Scientists fight bugs with poo
By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent
LONDON, Jan. 19, 2011 (Reuters) — Once a year, every year, Professor Thomas Borody receives a single-stem rose from one of his most grateful patients. She is, he says, thanking him for restoring her bowel flora.
It's a distasteful cure for a problem that's increasingly widespread: the Clostridium difficile bug, typically caught by patients in hospitals and nursing homes, can be hard to treat with antibiotics. But Borody is one of a group of scientists who believe the answer is a faecal transplant.
Some jokily call it a "transpoosion." Others have more sciencey names like "bacteriotherapy" or "stool infusion therapy." But the process involves, frankly, replacing a person's poo with someone else's, and in the process, giving them back the "good" bugs they desperately need. |