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Past Religious Diversity And Intolerance Have Profound Impact On Genetics Of Iberian PeopleNew research suggests that relatively recent events had a substantial impact on patterns of genetic diversity in the southwest region of Europe. The study shows that geographical patterns of ancestry appear to have been influenced by religious conversions of both Jews and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am Dry Winter Weather Results In Highest Particulate Pollution Levels From TrafficDry winter weather and low level mixing of pollutants from vehicle exhausts in cities leads to the highest concentrations of the tiny soot particles, known as PM10 particles, according to an article in the International Journal of Environment and Pollution. These findings suggest that traffic controls, other than an outright ban for several days at a time, would have little effect on levels.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am Scientists Prove Endothelial Cells Give Rise To Blood Stem CellsStem cell researchers have proven definitively that blood stem cells are made during mid-gestational embryonic development by endothelial cells, the cells that line the inside of blood vessels.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am 'Zinc Zipper' Plays Key Role In Hospital-acquired InfectionsScientists are exploring a "zinc zipper" that holds bacterial cells together and plays a key role in hospital-acquired infections.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am New Mouse Model Of Prion Disease: Mutant Proteins Result In Infectious Prion Disease In MiceScientists have created an infectious prion disease in a mouse model, in a step that may help unravel the mystery of this progressive disease that affects the nervous system in humans and animals.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am Inner Workings Of The Immune System FilmedForget what's number one at the box office this week. The most exciting new film features the intricate workings of the body, filmed by scientists using ground-breaking technology.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am Poor Children's Brain Activity Resembles That Of Stroke Victims, EEG ShowsPrefrontal cortex activity in children from low socioeconomic levels is lower than in similar children from well-off families. The brain differences, documented through EEGs, are dramatic: the prefrontal cortexes of poor kids 9 and 10 years of age react to novel stimuli in the same way as the brain of a stroke victim. The researchers believe this is fixable, however.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Dec 2008 | 7:00 pm Invasive Garden Ants As New Pest Insects In EuropeA new study illuminates where Lasius neglectus, a new ant that was discovered in 1990, comes from, how it organizes its supercolonies, and how it attained its pest status. The study provides a wake-up call for closer monitoring of urban ecosystems to eliminate infestations before they become problematic.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Dec 2008 | 7:00 pm Secondhand Smoke Raises Odds Of Fertility Problems In WomenIf you need another reason to quit smoking, consider that it may diminish your chances of being a parent or grandparent. Scientists have found that women exposed to second hand smoke, either as adults or children, were significantly more likely to face fertility problems and suffer miscarriages.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Dec 2008 | 7:00 pm Genetic Ancestry Of African-Americans Reveals New Insights About Gene ExpressionThe amount of proteins produced in cells -- a fundamental determinant of biological outcomes collectively known as gene expression -- varies in African-American individuals depending on their proportion of African or European genetic ancestry.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Dec 2008 | 7:00 pm EU seeks climate deal in PolandNicolas Sarkozy hopes to address East European concerns at talks in Poland aimed at finalising the EU's climate change package.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Dec 2008 | 11:04 am Japan to arrest anti-whaling activists: report (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Dec 2008 | 5:59 am Early warning system for Cern collider before next switch-onAn early warning system to prevent another massive liquid helium leak after one shut down the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, near Geneva, will be installed as part of repairs to the colossal underground machine. That is the recommendation of a report into the incident on September 19, nine days after the collider was switched on to great international fanfare. Repairing the damage done by the high pressure leak will take until next May, and the device, which recreates conditions not seen since the big bang, will not be switched on again until next June. In the meantime, physicists have a maddening wait before they can begin testing their theories about the fundamental nature of matter and searching for exotic new sub-atomic particles such as the Higgs boson. The early warning system is designed to prevent further helium leaks, but the report also recommends increasing the cross-section of pressure release valves by 40 times to allow helium to be vented rapidly into the tunnel without damaging the magnets that whiz sub-atomic particles around the 27km ring at within a whisker of the speed of light. The machine is the biggest experiment built and the tunnel housing it spans the border between France and Switzerland. The problem started when electrical resistance began building up at one of junctions between the magnets. Cern engineers do not know why this happened, but this is what the warning system will be designed to detect. "We don't know what went wrong because the junction is not there to look at. It was completely destroyed in the incident," said a Cern spokesman. "If you see resistance coming it's a sign that there's a problem. You can take the power off before you get the junction failing." The repairs are expected to cost 15m Swiss francs (£8.4m) but will use up most of Cern's spare parts. It will cost a further 10m to 12m Swiss francs to restock. The costs will be met within the Cern budget. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 6 Dec 2008 | 12:19 am Review: The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth's History by David BeerlingReview: The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth's History by David BeerlingDavid Beerling's book is both fascinating and important, writes PD SmithSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 6 Dec 2008 | 12:17 am Hubble to Finally Get Some Astronaut LoveThe beleaguered Hubble Space Telescope can finally look forward to getting a much needed pick-me-up in May when NASA sends its fourth, and last, manned space shuttle mission to the satellite. The aging observatory was due for an upgrade this past October, when NASA had planned to launch seven astronauts aboard the shuttle Atlantis to install new science instruments and change out old hardware. But in September a major glitch cost the orbiting telescope its ability to send images and information back down to Earth. Since then, Hubble was revived with a back-up system onboard, but engineers have been scrambling to ready a replacement instrument to swap with the hardware that failed. The new mission date is May 12, 2009. In the meantime, Hubble is still plugging along while it waits for its upgrade. On Thursday NASA released a new Hubble image showing hundreds of thousands of stars in the globular cluster M13 (above). When it does eventually get off the ground, the planned servicing mission is set to run 11 days, with five spacewalks during which astronauts will work to install a new camera, a new spectrograph, and a set of six new and improved gyroscopes, which help stabilize the telescope. The astronauts also plan to repair some broken instruments aboard the observatory and bring new batteries and thermal blankets that should help the telescope operate until at least 2013. If the overhaul goes as planned, experts say Hubble should be in the best shape it's ever been. Sadly, though, all good things must come to an end. When Hubble breaks down, NASA plans to send the satellite on a controlled dive down to Earth to burn up in the atmosphere. And speaking of depressing news and delays, NASA announced that its Mars Science Laboratory rover will launch two years later than planned, in the fall of 2011. The mission, which aims to study the early environmental history of Mars, has been held up by "testing and hardware challenges," NASA says. Since it won't be able to make its hoped-for 2009 launch date, it will have to wait quite a while, because the relative positions of Earth and Mars are favorable for flights to the red planet only a few weeks every two years. See Also:
Image: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Source: Wired: Wired Science | 5 Dec 2008 | 11:43 pm Feeling Sick? Getting Diagnosed Might Not be a Good Idea
Medical dramas, like House, have sold us on the notion that a doctor’s main job is to make a diagnosis, but putting labels on everyone’s illnesses might not be the best idea. In some cases, it could even make things worse. Today’s episode of Radio Lab tells several stories about people who may not be any better off now that they know what is wrong with them. In one segment, Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurologist, offered a chilling tale: Doctors once believed that sudden infant death syndrome was caused by enlarged thalamus glands, and that kids who seemed to be at risk should be treated with high doses of radiation. “Decades later, you’ve killed twenty to thirty thousand people with thyroid cancer,” said Sapolsky, during the show. Aside from knowing little about the dangers of radiation, doctors from that era did not have a good benchmark for what is normal and what is abnormal, so it was impossible to draw correct medical conclusions. In the May issue of Wired, Thomas Goetz, made a strong case that clinicians are still facing that problem. Since autopsies have gone out of style, and that's how doctors figure out what normal bodies look like, it may even be getting worse. But in other regards, medical science has come a very long way. Genetic tests can identify the exact molecular underpinnings of a disease. Though that raises a whole new set of issues. Also on Radio Lab, Lu Olkowski told the story of two doctors who were approached by a man with a family history of pancreatic cancer. He asked them to study the disease that plagued his kin. The clinicians figured it out, and became famous for their discovery, but they still have not found a cure. That tale may foreshadow the experiences that all of us will have, thanks to a growing biotechnology industry. New lab tests are popping up so fast that doctors will be able to pinpoint the underlying cause of many illnesses, even if they can't treat them. Sharing our own medical stories, like the ones from Radio Lab, might help us prepare for that uncertain future. Photo: sun dazed / flickr Source: Wired: Wired Science | 5 Dec 2008 | 10:56 pm Dog Frozen to Wis. Sidewalk; Fat Helped It SurviveAn obese dog survived being frozen to a sidewalk overnight.Source: Livescience.com | 5 Dec 2008 | 10:10 pm Is Einstein the Last Great Genius? (LiveScience.com)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Dec 2008 | 10:03 pm What's Old Is New: 12 Living FossilsTo navigate the currents of ecological fate, most creatures adapt — but a few have stuck to their evolutionary guns. Known as living fossils, they lasted for millions of years with barely a change, even as their relatives went extinct or took different paths across the tree of life. Many are now threatened or endangered. But with some luck and a little help, living fossils will be able to survive the age of humans, too.
The Purple frog, discovered just five years ago in western India, likely escaped detection because it lives underground, emerging for just two weeks during the monsoon season. Distinguished by a pointed snout, it's related to a family of frogs now found only on the Seychelles islands, which split from India 100 million years ago. Image: WikiMedia Commons
Scientists disagree over whether the frilled shark has survived for 380 milllion years, or a mere 95 million years. Only two living specimens have been found — both off the coast in Japan, in the late 19th century and again in 2007 — but they are sometimes caught accidentally by deep-sea fishing nets. Video: Xagtho Channel
Until a preserved specimen was found in the Smithsonian in 1975, the 10-footed, lobster-like Jurassic shrimp was thought to have gone
extinct 50 million years ago. Living Jurassic shrimp have since been found. Image: Census of Marine Life
Image: St. Petersburg Zoological Institute
Found mostly in Southern Hemisphere rain forests, velvet worms have legs and — unlike other worms — bear live young. Closely related to tardigrades,
their legs are hollow and supported by fluid pressure. After a few
early adaptations for land, they've hardly changed in 360 million
years. Video: InfiniteWorld
The most widespread of all living fossils, crocodiles have barely changed in the 230 million years since dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Image: Flickr/Keven Law
One of the relatively few mammalian living fossils, duck-billed platypuses have been weird for 110 million years: in addition to their bills, they lay eggs and have venom-filled leg spurs. No wonder they were considered a hoax by early naturalists. Video: Springbreakwas2short
Its spiraling chambered shell was a symbol of perfection in ancient Greece, and the nautilus has changed little in 500 million years. Image: Flickr/Ethan Hein
Found commonly on Atlantic beaches, horseshoe crabs are more closely related to spiders, ticks and scorpions than crabs. Their ancestors evolved in the Paleozoic's shallow seas, and they've evolved only slightly in the last 445 million years. If you see one on its back, flip it over: They can regrow lost limbs, but can't right themselves when tossed in the surf. Image: Flickr/Chris Howard
Better known as the "Ant from Mars," Martialis heureka is a direct-line descendant of the last common ancestor of all ants — a subterranean forager who wouldn't go above-ground until flowering plants evolved 120 million years ago.
Coelacanth vanished from the fossil record 410 million years ago — and then one was caught in 1938 off the coast of South Africa. A second species was discovered in Indonesian waters in 1999. Video: Pinktentacle3
Neither a mantis nor a shrimp, the mantis shrimp has changed little in 400 million years. It has the world's most complex eyes, and its prey-killing claw motion is the second-fastest animal motion. To quote mantis shrimp eye researcher Tom Cronin, "Whenever they get into any type of situation, they smash things. You can't pick these up. They're really great animals to have around." Image: Tom Cronin See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 5 Dec 2008 | 9:57 pm Is Einstein the Last Great Genius?Individuals vs. Institutions: Don't count scientific genius out just yet.Source: Livescience.com | 5 Dec 2008 | 9:53 pm Sephardic Jews leave genetic legacy in SpainMADRID (Reuters) - From the 15th century on, Spain's Jews were mostly expelled or forced to convert, but today some 20 percent of Spanish men tested have Sephardic Jewish ancestry, and 11 percent can be traced to North Africa, a study has found.Source: Reuters: Science News | 5 Dec 2008 | 9:30 pm Sephardic Jews leave genetic legacy in Spain (Reuters)Reuters - From the 15th century on, Spain's Jews were mostly expelled or forced to convert, but today some 20 percent of Spanish men tested have Sephardic Jewish ancestry, and 11 percent can be traced to North Africa, a study has found.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Dec 2008 | 9:30 pm Delays and Cost Overruns Epidemic at NASA, Former Official Charges (SPACE.com)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Dec 2008 | 9:10 pm Moderate earthquake shakes northern Japan (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Dec 2008 | 9:09 pm Heart Attack Patients Get 'Big Chill' TreatmentDoctors will test a new way of cooling heart attack patients.Source: Livescience.com | 5 Dec 2008 | 9:00 pm Grasshopper-Inspired Robot Can Jump Rocks on Other Planets
It jumps. It rolls. It could be coming soon to a planet near you. Designed by biomimetics researcher Rhodri Armour at the University of Bath, the Jollbot is a spherical cage that can roll in any direction. If it can't go around an obstacle, it goes over. To jump, the cage compresses and springs open — a mechanism inspired by the joints of a grasshopper's legs. Between rolling and jumping, Armour hopes the two-pound Jollbot will be able to handle rough terrain on other planets. "We've made a robot that jumps in a similar way to the grasshopper, but uses electrical motors to slowly store the energy needed to leap in its springy skeleton," he said in a press release. "Future prototypes could include a stretchy skin covered in solar cells on the outside of the robot, so it could power itself, and robotic control sensors to enable it to sense its environment. Another notable animal-inspired robot: the Roboswift, developed by Dutch aerospace students at the Delft University of Technology and Wagenhingen University.
See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 5 Dec 2008 | 8:39 pm Oil prices slide to four-year lows on weak US jobs data (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Dec 2008 | 8:32 pm Video Podcast No. 11: Synthetic Bio -- Better Life or Bad Business?Tinkering with DNA has always inspired strong feelings from the battles of genetically modified crops to the hits-and-misses of medical biotechnology. So naturally, synthetic biology, which aims to make custom-designing life forms easier and more predictable, stirs the passions. In this excerpt from the Long Now Foundation's debate on synthetic biology, Drew Endy, a Stanford bioengineer and leading light in the new field, and Jim Thomas, an eloquent critic with the futuristic watchdog group, the ETC Group, present two radically divergent visions for what synthetic biology will bring to the world. Endy says that synthetic biology could create tools that will "enable humanity" while Thomas argues that, like the synthetic chemicals industry, the science of synthetic bio will only help big corporations in rich countries. Both speakers are fascinating and make very different kinds of arguments. Whether you are a big believer in genetic engineering or worried about its social implications, you'll find something intriguing about the other side's presenter.
If you liked the excerpts, check out WIRED co-founder Stewart Brand's summary of the debate on the Long Now Foundation's website, and tune in to the full-length audio podcast of the session (MP3). Every week, Wired Science will bring you videos on the latest in science, medicine, energy and space. You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, too, so check us out there. See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 5 Dec 2008 | 8:21 pm Amazon Hosting, Crunching Massive Public Databases
As of Thursday, the annotated human genome, US Census data, and countless 3D renderings of molecules are available on the elastic servers. And users can upload their own boatload of information, without a fee. But there is a catch: If you want to crunch numbers on their server, or store the output there, it will not be free. Although the company will charge for its services, it seems committed to making them available to anyone with an internet connection, even scientists who operate on a shoestring budget. "For over five years AWS has been working to lower the barriers to entry, level the playing field, and make it possible for our customers to be successful based on their ideas, not on their resources," Adam Selipsky of Amazon said in a press release. "Public Data Sets on AWS is the latest of these efforts, and we can't wait to see the discoveries and innovations that could stem from this ecosystem." So far, that ecosystem seems to be populated by the elite, rather than the unwashed masses. Amazon detracted from its righteous message by providing this endorsement from one of their not-so-underprivileged early adopters. "Public Data Sets on AWS will enable me and many of my colleagues to collaborate with each other by sharing our commonly used data sets, research environments and tools," Peter Tonellato of Harvard Medical School said in the press release. "We can set up a controlled environment in minutes, run our computational analysis for a couple of hours, and shut down the environment. Our results are completely repeatable. I only pay for the compute time I use, and more importantly I can spend more time focusing on research, not downloading and setting up computational infrastructure." If the cost of the service were high, it would seem that Amazon's goal is to sound noble while cornering an emerging market — selling processor cycles to wealthy universities. But they appear to be reasonable. If the company does have an ulterior motive, it may simply be to experiment with and propagate its ideas about cloud computing. Some experts have dismissed the new brand of information technology as a trend, others can't seem to figure out what it is, but one thing is certain: Researchers are accumulating data at an incredible pace, and they will need versatile web-based tools to do their work. For that reason, Amazon could have another lucrative business soon. See Also:
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 5 Dec 2008 | 7:51 pm SLIDE SHOW: Images in the NewsFrom ancient cannabis to baby gorillas, highlights from Discovery News, Dec. 1-5.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 5 Dec 2008 | 7:38 pm Mars Phoenix's Twitter Proves a Huge SuccessTwitter messages like "I dig Mars!" helped bring a NASA Mars lander to life.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 5 Dec 2008 | 7:12 pm Friends reunitedRangers enter the Gorilla Sector after a 15-month waitSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Dec 2008 | 6:53 pm Scientist says ancient technique cuts greenhouse gasPOZNAN, Poland (Reuters) - An ancient technique of plowing charred plants into the ground to revive soil may also trap greenhouse gases for thousands of years and forestall global warming, scientists said on Friday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 5 Dec 2008 | 6:51 pm Early-warning system to prevent another LHC shutdownAn early-warning system to prevent another massive liquid helium leak at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern will be installed as part of repairs to the colossal underground machine, a report into the incident reveals. A high-pressure helium leak forced the LHC to shut down on September 19th, just nine days after it was switched on to great international fanfare. Repairing the damage inflicted by the leak will take until mid-May next year and the collider, which recreates conditions not seen since the big bang, will not be switched on again until June. So physicists face a maddening wait before they can begin testing their theories about the fundamental nature of matter and searching for exotic new sub-atomic particles such as the Higgs boson, which is thought to give all the matter in the universe its mass. The LHC is the biggest experiment ever built and the tunnel housing it spans the border between France and Switzerland. The early-warning system will be designed to prevent further helium leaks, but the report also recommends increasing the cross-section of pressure-release valves 40-fold to allow helium to be vented rapidly into the tunnel without damaging the magnets that whiz sub-atomic particles around the 27km ring at speeds within a whisker of the speed of light. The problem started when electrical resistance began building up at one of the junctions between the magnets. Cern engineers don't know exactly why this happened, but this is what the warning system will be designed to detect. "We don't know what went wrong because the junction is not there to look at. It was completely destroyed in the incident," said a Cern spokesperson. "If you see resistance coming it's a sign that there's a problem. You can take the power off before you get the junction failing." The spike in electric resistance led to the high-pressure helium leak, which knocked two of the huge magnets together. It also blew apart layers of foil insulation. "This stuff was torn to shreds and bits of it scattered all over the place. That takes some cleaning up," said the spokesperson. A total of 53 magnet units will need to be removed from the tunnel for cleaning or repair. Of these, 28 have already been brought to the surface and the first two replacement units have been installed in the tunnel. The repairs are expected to cost 15m swiss francs (£8.4m) and will use up most of Cern's spare parts. It will cost a further 10m to 12m swiss francs (£5.6m to £6.7m) to replenish these. The costs can be met from the Cern budget so the organisation will not need to ask member states for more money. Installation of the replacement magnets should be completed by the end of March, with work on the interconnections between them taking place between February and mid-May. "We have a lot of work to do over the coming months," said LHC project Leader Lyn Evans, "but we now have the roadmap, the time and the competence necessary to be ready for physics by summer. We are currently in a scheduled annual shutdown until May, so we're hopeful that not too much time will be lost." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 5 Dec 2008 | 6:17 pm NASA Space Probe to Track CO2 on EarthNASA prepares to launch a spacecraft to track CO2 on Earth from space.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 5 Dec 2008 | 5:38 pm Good News for Happy People: It's ContagiousWhen you're smiling, the whole world really does smile with you, finds new research.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 5 Dec 2008 | 5:14 pm Japan sells Icelandic whale meatWhale meat imported from Iceland and Norway goes on sale in Japan, sparking fears of trade growth.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Dec 2008 | 4:42 pm Intelligent 'have better sperm'Men of higher intelligence tend to produce better quality sperm, UK research suggests.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Dec 2008 | 4:37 pm Climate Change to Strain Colorado RiverClimate change and rising populations threaten the Colorado River.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 5 Dec 2008 | 4:21 pm For Carbon Storage, Burn the Bogs?Controlled burns of carbon-hoarding peat bogs could actually boost carbon storage.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 5 Dec 2008 | 4:00 pm Royal Institution Lectures: A computing revolutionThe way we control and interact with computers is set to change rapidly in the next five years, according to a leading computer scientist who will give this year's Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. Prof Chris Bishop, who is chief research scientist at Microsoft Research in Cambridge and professor of computer science at the University of Edinburgh, will tell his audience that just like Tom Cruise's character in the film Minority Report, more of us will be manipulating and combining digital information by gesturing in thin air and flinging our hands over touchscreen devices. He also predicts that 3D displays will replace the traditional flat screen for some applications. Bishop told the Guardian that his lectures, which begin tomorrow in the newly refurbished Faraday Lecture Theatre at the Royal Institution in London, are about communicating the big ideas behind how computers and the internet work. "You can get lost in the detail with computers," he said, "but if you strip away the detail there are a few very beautiful ideas. One of the things I want to do with the lectures is to bring those ideas alive." This year's lectures are sold out, but they will be screened by Channel Five over Christmas. The lectures – which have become as much a Christmas TV tradition as the Queen's speech and James Bond – were set up in 1825 by Michael Faraday to educate young people about science. Faraday himself presented 19 lecture series. Recent lecturers have included Sir David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan. They have been suspended only once, during the second world war. As well as predicting what the future of computing holds, Bishop will wow his audience with some mind-boggling facts. For example, the fingernail-sized silicon chip at the heart of your desktop has 400m components, each a hundred times smaller than a bacterium. It can multiply two huge numbers together in a billionth of a second – the time it takes a high–speed rifle bullet to travel a tenth of the width of a human hair. "People are very bad at that task – for example my arithmetic's terrible," confessed Bishop. "It would take me all day to multiply two big numbers together and I'd make a mistake anyway." The silicon chips in laptops and desktops are just 1% of the roughly 10bn that are manufactured each year. The rest are often hidden in everyday objects. "People don't realise that in their wallet they are probably carrying around half a dozen computers," said Bishop. Your credit card, for example, contains a computer that has 30 times more processing power and 100 times more memory than the guidance computer that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon in the 1960s, he said. In his final lecture on December 17th, Bishop will tackle his own research field: artificial intelligence. Computers are extremely good at quickly solving tasks that can be expressed as a logical series of discrete steps, like multiplying two numbers together. But they are terrible at tasks that involve pattern recognition, such as saying whether an image contains a cat or a dog. In his research, Bishop is teaching computers to learn more like people. So instead of expressing the task as a series of steps he gives the computer thousands of cat images and thousands of dog images and allows the machine to work out what features in the images are important for telling them apart. "The computer has to deal with the variability and the ambiguity and the sometimes contradictory information that it receives," he said. "That's something that people are quite used to. I guess it is something we have to deal with in everyday life." Bishop said there will be more practical demonstrations in this year's lecture series and they will be more comple than in any previous year. They range from the hi-tech – a 3D projection of a human organ – to kitchen science – using food colouring and water to illustrate how credit card information is encrypted as it passes across the internet. There will even be a demonstration of the exponential growth in computing power using 225 mouse traps each primed with a ping-pong ball. Bishop, who admitted to being "daunted" at the prospect of standing at the front of the Faraday theatre, said the Christmas lectures were instrumental in his choice of career. "They played a huge part in my childhood," he said. "As a child I watched them every year and was completely enthralled by them. I think watching the Christmas lectures was a big factor in me realising how exciting it is to be a scientist." "I was fascinated by chemistry as a child," he added. "I had a chemistry set and I used to blow things up." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 5 Dec 2008 | 4:00 pm Climate bill 'could lead world'A new Scottish bill to help tackle climate change could be a "world leader", environmental groups claim.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Dec 2008 | 3:42 pm The Perfect Family Is a MythThere's something "right" about a nuclear family, or so we think.Source: Livescience.com | 5 Dec 2008 | 3:17 pm Video: New population of Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys foundDiscovery of a new breeding colony in the north of Vietnam is good news for the future of a species pushed to the brink of extinctionSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 5 Dec 2008 | 2:59 pm Crimes to Climate History: Tiny Diatoms Offer Big CluesA botanist studies microorganisms in lakes, oceans and other water sources that hold clues to climate and crimes.Source: Livescience.com | 5 Dec 2008 | 2:59 pm Climate scientists say 2008 will be coolest year of the decadeThis year is set to be the coolest since 2000, according to a preliminary estimate of global average temperature that is due to be released next week by the Met Office. The global average for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, which is 0.14C below the average temperature for 2001-07. The relatively chilly temperatures compared with recent years are not evidence that global warming is slowing however, say climate scientists at the Met Office. "Absolutely not," said Dr Peter Stott, the manager of understanding and attributing climate change at the Met Office's Hadley Centre. "If we are going to understand climate change we need to look at long-term trends." Prof Myles Allen at Oxford University who runs the climateprediction.net website, said he feared climate sceptics would overinterpret the figure. "You can bet your life there will be a lot of fuss about what a cold year it is. Actually no, its not been that cold a year, but the human memory is not very long, we are used to warm years," he said, "Even in the 80s [this year] would have felt like a warm year." And 2008 would have been a scorcher in Charles Dickens's time - without human-induced warming there would have been a one in a hundred chance of getting a year this hot. "For Dickens this would have been an extremely warm year," he said. On the flip side, in the current climate there is a roughly one in 10chance of having a year this cool. The Met Office predicted at the beginning of the year that 2008 would be cooler than recent years because of a La Niña event - characterised by unusually cold ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. It is the mirror image of the El Niño climate cycle. The Met Office had forecast an annual global average of 14.37C. Allen was presenting the data on this year's global average temperature at the Appleton Space Conference at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Didcot yesterday. The 14.3C figure is based on data from January to October. When the Met Office makes its formal announcement next week they will incorporate data from November. "[The figure] will differ from it, but it won't differ massively," said Stott, "We would expect the number to go up rather than down because the early parts of the year were still under the La Niña conditions." Assuming the final figure is close to 14.3C then 2008 will be the tenth hottest year on record. The hottest was 1998 - which included a very strong El Niño event - followed by 2005, 2003 and 2002. The data are a combination of measurements from satellites, ground weather stations and buoys which are compiled jointly by the Hadley Centre and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. In March, a team of climate scientists at Kiel University predicted that natural variation would mask the 0.3C warming predicted by the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change over the next decade. They said that global temperatures would remain constant until 2015 but would then begin to accelerate. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 5 Dec 2008 | 2:48 pm Ancient Roman Oil Lamp 'Factory Town' FoundArchaeologists find remains of workshops that produced oil lamps for the Roman empire.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 5 Dec 2008 | 2:32 pm Venter Lab Makes Progress on Artificial LifeCelebrity scientist Craig Venter devises a new way to build a synthetic genome.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 5 Dec 2008 | 2:13 pm The Energy Debates: Clean CoalThe Energy Debates is a LiveScience series about the pros, cons, policy debates, myths and facts related to various alternative energy ideas.Source: Livescience.com | 5 Dec 2008 | 2:10 pm Power Doesn't Corrupt, Study SuggestsPresident-elect Barack Obama may be shielded from influence of advisors.Source: Livescience.com | 5 Dec 2008 | 1:40 pm Open thread: It's official: we can smell fear and cheerfulness is contagious. Can one counteract the other?Open thread: It's official: we can smell fear and cheerfulness is contagious. Can one counteract the other?Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 5 Dec 2008 | 1:30 pm One giant leap: Cambridge school children send their teddies into the stratosphereTeddy bears are launched into the stratosphere. The UK's new space policy? No, just a Cambridge University schools project.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Dec 2008 | 1:21 pm Teen Self-Esteem May Be Too HighSome think the pendulum may have swung too far.Source: Livescience.com | 5 Dec 2008 | 1:13 pm Winds of changeThe EU's climate package is getting a rough rideSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Dec 2008 | 12:38 pm "Big Bang" collider repairs to cost up to $29 millionGENEVA (Reuters) - Repairing the giant particle collider built to simulate the "Big Bang" could cost up to 35 million Swiss francs ($29 million), the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Friday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 5 Dec 2008 | 11:51 am Between a rock and a hard placeWhat do the words Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous and Permian mean to you? They are the periodic divisions of the Palaeozoic era, and although these terms are in standard use in every country in the world, four of them are based on direct observations in Britain and a fifth was named by Sir Roderick Murchison when he took his geological hammer to some telltale rocks in Russia. Like association football, rugby, cricket, golf and Newtonian physics, geology is part of Britain's gift to the rest of the planet. So the revelation that there are so few trained earth scientists in Britain that the Home Office is encouraging foreign-trained researchers to migrate is not bad news for British universities. It is humiliating news. It suggests that geology is a science at a national discount, with practitioners to be imported as necessary, while our schools and colleges get on with really important things such as media studies, fashion design and advanced food preparation. Geology is the bedrock of every economy. It shores up all our wealth. Everything material that we possess is either dug from the soil, or grown in it. The ground we stand on is not just our richest asset, but our only material asset: it provides all our fine china and our coarse pottery; all our diamonds and rubies, all our pennies and all our golden guineas: it delivers the cement, sand and gravel for our cities, the tar and asphalt for our roads, the clay for our tennis courts, the terroir for our wine-tasters and the mineral water for sybarites seeking a detox. It yields the bricks for our homes, the slate for our roofs, the plaster for our ceilings, and the tiles for our floors. The fuels we use - petrol or uranium, natural gas or anthracite - come from the ground, along with the iron for our tools and the feedstock for our plastics industries. The information society runs on copper and silicon from the rocks, and the coin we pay for these things is minted from metals found in seams between the rocks. We even pay unconscious tribute to geology in our clichés: old as the hills, good as gold, thick as a brick, clear as mud, set in stone, hit the dirt, no stone unturned, grit in the oyster and so on. How did we get to this state? These are the dying days of the International Year of Planet Earth. Next year will be the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and the 150th since the publication of The Origin of Species. These two celebrations are related. The great debate about fossils set geologists thinking about the age of the planet. It was the geologist Charles Lyell who inspired the young Darwin, and one of Darwin's first scientific honours was for his contributions to geology. Meanwhile, planet Earth is under pressure. Its human population has reached unparalleled numbers, many of the world's great rivers are beginning to run dry, most of the great forests are under threat, deserts are advancing, glaciers retreating and sea levels rising. So there are plenty of challenges for earth scientists: in civil engineering, in oceanography, in hydrology, atmosphere and climate science, and in geophysics. Geologists and geophysicists can do good and save lives: they are usually the first to identify natural hazards and suggest ways of mitigating risk. The stakes are always high and getting higher: natural disasters killed around 230,000 people between January and June of this year, but altogether an estimated 130 million people lost their harvests, or their livestock, or their homes, or their livelihoods, or their savings in those earthquakes, floods, forest fires, typhoons and cyclones, according to Cred, the centre for research on the epidemiology of disasters at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. But geology is also a home for the scholarly. Archaeologists need earth scientists; so do the space agencies behind the missions to Mars and Venus, Saturn and Mercury. Geologists and geophysicists can also make money: they are key figures in the extraction of oil, minerals and metals. Like merchant bankers, geologists have access to state-of-the-art technology; unlike merchant bankers, geologists can go to work in denims and comfortable boots and spend time out of doors. The world may be closing in on merchant bankers, but geologists can find work almost anywhere. Why have students voted with their feet? And why have university geology departments closed, when we have, quite literally, the world to play for? To invoke yet another down-to-earth cliché, have we lost our marbles? guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 5 Dec 2008 | 11:45 am
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