Machines Can't Replicate Human Image Recognition, Yet

While computers can replicate many aspects of human behavior, they do not possess our ability to recognize distorted images, according to a team of researchers.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

Link Found Between Common Sexual Infection And Risk Of Aggressive Prostate Cancer

A new study has found a strong association between the common sexually transmitted infection, Trichomonas vaginalis, and risk of advanced and lethal prostate cancer in men.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

Memories Exist Even When Forgotten, Study Suggests

A woman looks familiar, but you can't remember her name or where you met her. New research suggests the memory exists -- you simply can't retrieve it.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

Obesity, Alcohol Consumption And Smoking Increase Risk Of Second Breast Cancer

A new study has found that obesity, alcohol use and smoking all significantly increase the risk of second breast cancer among breast cancer survivors.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

Novel Bacterial Strains Clear Algal Toxins From Drinking Water

Researchers have identified novel bacterial strains capable of neutralizing toxins produced by blue-green algae.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

New Robot Travels Across The Seafloor To Monitor The Impact Of Climate Change On Deep-sea Ecosystems

Like the robotic rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which wheeled tirelessly across the dusty surface of Mars, a new robot spent most of July traveling across the muddy ocean bottom, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) off the California coast. This robot, the Benthic Rover, has been providing scientists with an entirely new view of life on the deep seafloor. It will also give scientists a way to document the effects of climate change on the deep sea.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

Tornado Threat Increases As Gulf Hurricanes Get Larger

Tornadoes that occur from hurricanes moving inland from the Gulf Coast are increasing in frequency, according to researchers. This increase seems to reflect the increase in size and frequency among large hurricanes that make landfall from the Gulf of Mexico.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

New Type Of Adult Stem Cells Found In Prostate May Be Involved In Cancer Development

A new type of stem cell discovered in the prostate of adult mice can be a source of prostate cancer, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

Gene Variant Heightens Risk Of Severe Liver Disease In Cystic Fibrosis

New research could lead to earlier detection and diagnosis of cystic fibrosis liver disease and better treatment options for the patients affected by the disease.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

Model Backs Green Tea And Lemon Claim, Lessens Need To Test Animals

An animal study has shown that adding ascorbic acid and sugar to green tea can help the body absorb helpful compounds and also demonstrates the effectiveness of a model that could reduce the number of animals needed for these types of studies.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

EU steps up efforts for new global climate pact (AP)

AP - Fearing that a possible global deal on climate change is in danger, European foreign ministers announced Thursday they were stepping up efforts to make sure that nations around the world face up to global warming.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 4:35 am

Google plans new mirror for cheaper solar power (Reuters)

Reuters - Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 4:00 am

DNA pioneer appeals for freethinking scientists (AP)

AP - The geneticist who discovered DNA fingerprinting says scientists must be allowed to conduct research driven by nothing but curiosity.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 4:00 am

Taking the misery out of meat-eating?

Scientists are working on creating livestock that are immune to pain. Would it make you feel less guilty when enjoying a steak?

Researchers into genetics and neuroscience are working on creating livestock that are immune to pain by trying to locate and eliminate the pain gene. This, according to philosopher Adam Shriver, is the very least that should be ethically done as we consume almost 300m tonnes of meat a year – a figure that only looks set to rise.

How would you feel about picking up your pork chops with a "pain free" sticker slapped on the packaging? Should we try to limit the suffering of animals as we continue to feed our insatiable appetite for meat, even if it means using genetic modification?

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 10 Sep 2009 | 4:00 am

Sarkozy pushes ahead with new carbon tax (AFP)

AFP - French President Nicolas Sarkozy was set Thursday to unveil details of a new carbon tax to help combat global warming despite strong public opposition to the proposed levy.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 3:45 am

The Nation's weather (AP)

AP - Wet weather was forecast to persist across much of the Eastern U.S. on Thursday as a stationary frontal boundary lingered over the Southeast.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 3:35 am

Japan to send first cargo spacecraft to ISS (AFP)

AFP - Japan was readying to launch its first cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station on Friday, aiming for a share of space transport after the retirement of the US space shuttle fleet next year.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 3:25 am

Honeybees use their wings to blow away marauding ants

Honeybees are filmed for the first time using their wings to blow away marauding ants.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Sep 2009 | 3:08 am

Gossip girl

Sue Nelson reports from the British Science Festival
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Sep 2009 | 3:08 am

China could be $1 trillion green tech market (AP)

AP - China potentially could be a $500 billion to $1 trillion a year market for environmentally sustainable "green technologies," a group of businesses and experts said in a report Thursday that urges governments to ease the way for such initiatives.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 2:46 am

Space shuttle aims for homecoming, but storms loom (AP)

AP - Space shuttle Discovery and its crew of seven will try to return to Earth on Thursday. But thunderstorms could keep them in orbit an extra day or two.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 1:44 am

Japan town presses on with annual dolphin hunt (AFP)

AFP - A Japanese coastal town has gone ahead with its controversial dolphin hunt, shrugging off protests from animal-rights activists, local officials said Thursday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 1:18 am

Australia in $60 bln Japan, S.Korea gas deals (AFP)

AFP - Australia on Thursday announced liquefied natural gas (LNG) deals worth up to 60 billion US dollars with Japan and South Korea, raising its status as a major energy supplier.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Sep 2009 | 12:58 am

Music lessons improve memory, intelligence and behaviour

As the government launches the National Year of Music, a new report confirms that learning an instrument has many benefits for children

Learning a musical instrument at school improves children's behaviour, memory and intelligence, a government-commissioned study has found, as ministers launch the first National Year of Music.

Professor Susan Hallam, of the Institute of Education, University of London, analysed scores of researchers' studies on the benefits of music to children.

She found researchers had discovered that learning to play an instrument enlarges the left side of the brain. This leads musically-trained pupils to remember almost a fifth more information.

Hallam's research review was commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families as part of a drive to persuade more children in England to play a musical instrument.

The government hopes to double the number of children, aged seven to 11, who are given a chance to learn an instrument for free by 2011. The government says that now over half of primary-aged children - 1m - learn an instrument.

A study contrasting the impact of music lessons with that of drama classes found music lessons, over time, increased pupils' IQ by seven points, compared to 4.3 points for drama lessons.

Several US studies have found that playing an instrument improves children's behaviour. This was because working in small musical groups requires trust, respect and compromise, Hallam said.

"In adolescence, music makes a major contribution to the development of self-identity and is seen as a source of support when young people are feeling troubled or lonely," Hallam said.

But singing or piano lessons do not necessarily improve children's maths ability. "The relationship between maths and active musical engagement has had mixed results," Hallam said.

Ministers say they have invested £330m in music "inside and outside the classroom" in the last year.

It comes as the government launches the first National Year of Music.

This will see long-haired rock guitarist, Slash, partnered with the neatly-combed education secretary, Ed Balls, to take part in what the government has called the biggest music lesson ever.

Some of the country's best-known artists, including jazz-pop singer Jamie Cullum and funk singer VV Brown, will play from the classrooms of a comprehensive in Acton, west London today. Others, such as Slash, will be recorded playing from afar for the occasion.

Thousands of schools across the country will link up to hear and see them.

Balls said: "Music is at the very heart of British popular culture – it's what kids talk about, it's what they aspire to. It's fantastic that TV talent shows like X Factor attract millions of viewers each week, but young people need to know that they can only become stars by mastering the basics when they're young and by learning about a range of music, from classical to country. This is exactly why we need world-class music education in schools. We know that learning to play an instrument can improve both reading and writing. It is right that music should play an important role in school life and beyond."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Sep 2009 | 11:00 pm

DNA fingerprinting 25 years old

The scientist behind DNA fingerprinting calls for a change to databases on the 25th anniversary of his discovery.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Sep 2009 | 7:35 pm

Fixed-up Hubble telescope spots distant stardust

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The freshly repaired and outfitted Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a new butterfly-shaped galaxy and wisps of stardust containing the elements of life being recycled into new galaxies, NASA said on Wednesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 9 Sep 2009 | 6:52 pm

Spaceman

Hubble - revitalised and ready to reveal more wonders
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Sep 2009 | 6:07 pm

Last Days of Big American Physics: One More Triumph, or Just Another Heartbreak?

BATAVIA, Illinois — High-energy particle physicists around the world are collectively holding their breath waiting for the Large Hadron Collider to come online and start unlocking the most elusive secrets of the universe. It’s as if time is standing still until their shiny new toy is ready to play with.

But not at Fermilab. Here, physicists are in the scientific equivalent of an all-out sprint, still clinging to the ever-thinning hope that before the LHC ramps up to full power, their own 28-year old particle collider, the Tevatron, will catch the coveted Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that is at the heart of the Standard Model of physics.

“It’s a worthy fight,” said physicist Roy Schwitters of the University of Texas at Austin. “Their chances are certainly not zero, but they’re not great.”

The race for the Higgs boson is loaded with the history of competition between American and European particle physics, and symbolizes scientific prowess and national pride. For the United States, finding this particle would be the perfect final chapter to a book filled with major scientific achievements. Failing to find it would be the latest in a long string of missed opportunities and heartbreak.

The advantage in this rivalry has swung back and forth across the Atlantic for more than seven decades. The Tevatron, capable of generating a trillion electron volts (1 TeV), still reigns as the most powerful accelerator on Earth, and is performing better than ever. But somehow the impending swing feels more permanent, adding an extra weight to the already laden quest for the next great discovery.

The Standard Model unifies all the forces in the universe and explains why the symmetry believed to exist just after the Big Bang no longer exists, why matter is far more abundant than antimatter and why some particles have more mass than others. The Higgs boson is a remnant of that early symmetrical universe, and finding it would provide the strongest evidence yet for the Model.

As Europe’s new machine approached its start up last year, physicists estimated it would be producing results by the end of 2009. The Higgs was thought to be one of its first potential big finds.

But a breakdown just days after the first beam circulated through the LHC in September 2008, and another In July, forced scientists to set back the collider’s start to November. And it will happen at a slower pace than originally hoped, which means it will be even longer before it reaches its estimated maximum power of 7 TeV.

This has given Fermilab a reprieve, perhaps a year or more, to reach the finish line.

“That’s an important lease on life for them,” said Schwitters. “I applaud what they are doing, trying to get as much science as they can before it is eclipsed.”

Fermilab’s Tevatron is running better, producing more particle collisions per second and generating results faster than ever. And in its waning moments of glory, its scientists aren’t giving up on their aging machine, even if the rest of the world has.

Still the King

The Tevatron lies beyond the Chicago suburbs, beneath a windridden field that appears to have no purpose. From afar, the storied laboratory is marked solely by the administrative building, a strangely swooping structure rising from the plain, designed to capture the essence of a French cathedral. The rest of the campus is primarily a collection of low, boxy buildings that look completely utilitarian and mostly gray.

Standing in front of the nondescript building that houses the Tevatron’s D-Zero detector with physicist Dmitri Denisov, it’s hard not to be caught up in his optimism about the Higgs.

“We are lucky here at Fermilab because everything is pointing to the mass region of this particle which could be covered by the Tevatron,” he said. “It’s at the edges, but we think we could.”

The Tevatron’s four-mile long ring has a second detector, the CDF, and the intentional sibling rivalry between the two groups of scientists that work on the detectors has kept the pace of discovery high. They race each other to find new particles and nail down their characteristics, feed on each other’s successes and confirm each other’s findings.

Based on theory and work done so far at the Tevatron and other machines including the Large Electron-Positron Collider at CERN, the mass of the Higgs is expected to be between 114 and 185 GeV. In March, Fermilab announced it had ruled out another chunk of masses between 160 and 170 GeV.

“f really there is no Standard Model Higgs in the mass range which we expect it to be, if it is much heavier — and there are some theories which predict it much heavier — then of course it is a different story,” Denisov said. “But if it’s really around 200, 180 or 190 GeV, then we will be able to exclude it, or start to see the Higgs. And we are working for exclusion or discovery.”

Even if all the work chipping away at the Higgs territory only ends up providing an easier cherry for the LHC to pick, it still amounts to an important scientific contribution. But as Denisov explains this, the look in his eyes reveals how he really feels: The Tevatron has got this one the bag.

“We know how to make discoveries,” he said.

It is easy to root for the Tevatron, the former-champ-turned-underdog, and believe it can succeed. But at the same time, it’s hard not to imagine its failure. And the thought of the Tevatron stumbling just inches away from the finish line is all the more heartbreaking in light of America’s long history in particle physics, which was a painful struggle at times.

An Eye for an Eye

Europe and the United States have been vying to make discoveries since the birth of high-energy particle physics in 1930, when E.O. Lawrence of the University of California, Berkeley built the first cyclotron. That was a 4-inch circular device that used a magnetic field to accelerate protons to 80,000 electron-volts. Soon the American physicist was building bigger and bigger cyclotrons discovering many isotopes and winning a Nobel Prize along the way.

But the Europeans began building their own accelerators, and the race was on to split open the nucleus of an atom. It was close, but the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Labs under Ernest Rutherford won.

At this point the United States veered away from theoretical pursuits toward more practical applications, guided by Lawrence’s adept salesmanship.

“Lawrence was the first to see that cyclotrons could be used in medicine,” said physicist Paul Halpern, author of the book Collider. “That was brilliant because then he began receiving grants to explore medical uses of the cyclotron, and that gave him a lot of money to build new equipment.”

And when the Manhattan Project came along, Lawrence jumped on that train as well. His 184-inch cyclotron, which could push various particles to more than 100 million electron-volts, aided in the separation of uranium isotopes for use in the atomic bomb.

Soon the United States overtook Europe at the leading edge of high-energy physics, and big machines began to dominate the scene. In the 1950s and 1960s accelerators that could top a billion electron-volts dominated the scene: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Bevatron, which discovered the antiproton, and Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Cosmotron.

“At Brookhaven, researchers developed ways of focusing beams very tightly and being able to improve what’s called the luminosity, which is the chance of collisions,” Halpern said. “And that was a great innovation.”

The next big step was colliders: accelerators that, instead of aiming a particle beam at a fixed target, would smash opposing beams of particles into each other. In the 1970s, small colliders were built at CERN and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which detected mesons and leptons.

Bigger colliders were needed for the next discoveries. But Fermilab was in no rush to turn the newly minted Tevatron, the world’s first superconducting accelerator, into a collider. Instead they focused on bringing it up to its goal of 1 TeV. Along the way, the Tevatron dealt a blow to CERN by exceeding 300 BeV, the target energy of the Super Proton Synchrotron, which was still being built.

But Europe would soon return the favor, and then some.

In 1978, Brookhaven began building ISABELLE, a synchrotron collider designed to detect new particles including the W and Z bosons. But by 1981, CERN had converted the SPS into a proton-antiproton collider and discovered both bosons within two years.

Even though ISABELLE’s four-mile tunnel had been dug, construction had begun and $200 million had been spent, the project was deemed obsolete and canceled in 1983.

The United States turned its attention back to the Tevatron, and had converted it to a collider by 1985. Europe soon built the 17-mile-long Large Electron-Positron Collider, but the Tevatron’s main competition was internal, between the teams of scientists working on its two detectors. Discoveries began flowing from Illinois, including the top quark.

But American physicists were still feeling the burn of ISABELLE’s defeat, and never stopped looking over their shoulder at CERN. They began plotting in 1983 to build a $5 billion machine with a 54-mile long track that could attain 20 trillion electron-volts and answer all those nagging questions about the universe.

They called it the Superconducting Super Collider.

Super Collapse

“The Super Collider was born out of the failure of ISABELLE,” said physicist Roy Schwitters, who was the director of the SSC project.

By 1986 the colossal machine had been designed, and Congress allocated $200 million toward planning. Twenty-five states offered up 43 sites for the SSC. Building at Fermilab made sense because the project could capitalize on existing infrastructure, and the Tevatron could be used to feed particles to the new collider. But Texas pledged $1 billion of its own money and won the collider, while Fermilab watched its future evaporate.

“Basically what they did is they thought big, and they went with Texas and went with a place where there was absolutely no connection to particle physics before,” Halpern said. “They just started from scratch and really built a whole city, in a sense, to support this new collider.”

With the support of President Reagan and the first President Bush, the SSC moved forward despite numerous technical challenges and internal disagreements among U.S. physicists. Ground was broken and the SSC was on target to begin working in 1999. Scientists hoped the Higgs might even show itself before the century was spent.

But in the meantime, Europe had decided to add the Large Hadron Collider to the existing 17-mile ring at CERN. European money that Congress had counted on began flowing toward the LHC instead. At the same time, the SSC budget grew to more than $10 billion, and the American collider began accumulating critics.

President Bill Clinton appealed to Congress to continue supporting the SSC, arguing that “abandoning the SSC at this point would signal that the United States is compromising its position of leadership in basic science — a position unquestioned for generations.”

But in 1993, even though $2 billion had already been spent, more than 14 miles of tunnel had been dug and a quarter of the project was completed, Congress voted to kill the giant atom smasher.

The only things the SSC would ever smash were the careers of scientists who had bet everything on the new machine, and the hopes of the town of Waxahachie, Texas, which had completely poured itself into the project and was left with nothing but abandoned buildings.

The U.S. physics community would never quite recover from the blow.

“Ironically, if that had been built, all the discoveries we’re talking about for CERN would have already been made,” said Stu Loken, a Berkeley Lab physicist who worked on the Bevatron.

At this point, yielding the energy frontier to Europe is a done deal. And the United States is not likely to get it back. Like the LHC, should the next big machine be built, it will undoubtedly be an international project. Though it may never come to fruition, early planning is already underway for a mammoth machine called the International Linear Collider. The United States will most likely be involved, but the glory days of an American machine dominating the physics landscape are gone … almost.

The Tevatron is still king. Its celebrated detection of the top quark in 1995 was the last major discovery in high-energy physics. The Higgs boson has been a long time coming. Finally catching it at Fermilab wouldn’t undo the heartbreak of the past, but it would certainly make it easier to switch off the lights and watch the world turn away to focus on the new machine.

Images: 1) Aerial view of the Tevatron ring / Fermilab. 2) Fermilab’s Wilson Hall administrative building / Fermilab. 3) Dmitri Denisov / Betsy Mason, Wired.com. 4) Lawrence’s original 4-inch cyclotron / Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 5) ISABELLE’s ring, now used for the RHIC / Brookhaven National Laboratory. 6) SSC / Jim Merithew, Wired.com.

See Also:

• For Sale: $20 Million Particle Accelerator, Never Used
• The Large Hadron Collider Demystified
• An Excerpt From the New Book, Collider
• Large Hadron Collider: Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios
• Video: Large Hadron Collider Fires Up Partying Physicists
• $8 Billion LHC Particle Smasher Gets New Start-Up Date
• Large Hadron Collider Down Until 2009
• LHC Suffers More Leaks, and Delays
• LHC to Begin Collisions in Fall… Right?
• Historic Atom Smasher Reduced to Rubble and Revelry

Follow us on Twitter @betsymason and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 9 Sep 2009 | 5:56 pm

An Insider’s Guide to the Large Hadron Collider

After more than fifteen years of planning and more than eight billion dollars in funding, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), science’s groundbreaking effort to unlock the deepest secrets of particle physics, is finally complete. It is truly the grandest experiment of all time — the pinnacle of humanity’s quest for unification. Befitting the pursuit of cosmic grandeur and unity, it is set in a stunning location.

Query a world traveler about locales of striking beauty and harmony, and chances are Switzerland would be high up on the list. From its majestic mountains and crystalline lakes to its quaint cog railways and charming medieval towns, it is hard to imagine a better place to base a search for unification. Indeed the Swiss confederation, uniting inhabitants divided into four different official languages (French, German, Italian, and Romansch), several major religions (Protestant, Catholic, and other faiths), and twenty-six distinct cantons, physically isolated in many cases from one another, represents a model for bringing disparate forces together into a single system. Though in past centuries Switzerland experienced its share of turmoil, in more recent times it has become a haven for peace and neutrality.

As Europe’s political frontiers have receded, many scientific roadblocks have fallen as well. The LHC crosses the Swiss-French border with the ease of a diplomat. Its seventeen-mile-long circular underground tunnel, recycled from a retired accelerator called the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), represents a triumph for international cooperation. Only by working in unison, it reminds us, might we discover the secrets of natural unity.

American researchers form a large contingent in the major LHC experiments. They are proud to contribute to such a pivotal venture. Although the United States is not a member of CERN, it donates ample funds toward LHC research. While celebrating Europe’s achievements, however, many American physicists still quietly mourn what could have taken place at home.

In 1993, the U.S. Congress voted to cut off funding for what would have been a far bigger, more powerful project, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). About fourteen miles of a planned fifty-four-mile tunnel in the region of Waxahachie, Texas, had already been excavated before the plug was pulled. Today that land sits fallow, except for the weed-strewn abandoned buildings on the site. Years of anticipation of novel discoveries were crushed in a single budgetary decision.

President Bill Clinton sent a letter to the House Appropriations Committee expressing his strong concerns: “Abandoning the SSC at this point would signal that the United States is compromising its position of leadership in basic science — a position unquestioned for generations.”

Nevertheless, tight purse strings won out over sweeping visions. The cancellation of the SSC shattered the plans of those who had made multiyear commitments to the enterprise and discouraged young researchers from pursuing the field. It would prove a horrendous setback for American high-energy physics, shifting the momentum across the Atlantic.

By delivering a planned 20-TeV burst of energy with each collision, the particle-smasher in Texas would have been energetic enough to conduct a thorough search for the elusive God particle. Perhaps in its hatchery, supersymmetric companion particles would have been born, presenting themselves through their characteristic decay profiles. Dark matter could have made itself known in caverns deep beneath the Texas soil. The ramifications of string theory and other unification models could have been explored. Like the moon landings, these expeditions could have been launched from U.S. soil. With the LHC’s completion, the Tevatron will soon be obsolete and no more large American accelerators are planned. What went wrong?

The reason lies with long-term planning and commitment to science, an area where sadly the United States has in recent times often fallen short. Each European member of CERN pledges a certain amount every year, depending on its gross national product. Thus the designers of the LHC could count on designated funding over the many years required to get the enterprise up and running. Already, the upgrades of coming years are being programmed. Foresight and persistence are the keys to the LHC’s success.

Not that there haven’t been frustrating glitches and delays. Contemporary high-energy physics requires delicate instrumentation that must be aligned perfectly and maintained in extreme environmental conditions such as ultracold temperatures. Despite researchers best efforts, systems often fail. Originally supposed to go on line in 2005, the LHC wasn’t yet ready. Its opening was delayed again in 2007 because of accidental damage to some of its magnets.

On September 10, 2008, proton beams were circulated successfully for the first time around the LHC’s large ring. Project leader Lyn Evans and the international team of researchers working at the lab were elated. “It’s a fantastic moment,” said Evans. “We can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe.”

Nine days later, however, that heady summer of hope screeched to a halt due to a devastating malfunction. Before particle collisions had even been attempted, a faulty electrical connection in the wiring between two magnets heated up, causing the supercooled helium surrounding them to vaporize. Liquid helium is a critical part of the LHC’s cooling system that keeps its superconducting magnets functioning properly. In gaseous form, the helium began to leak profusely into the vacuum layer that surrounds the system, thwarting attempts by emergency release valves to channel it off safely. Then came the knockout punch. The flood of helium slammed into the magnets, jostled them out of position, and destroyed more wiring and part of the beam pipe. Upon inspection, technicians realized that it would take many months to repair the damage, recheck the electrical and magnetic systems around the ring, and attempt operations once more. Currently, the LHC is scheduled to go on line in September 2009.

When it is up and running, the LHC will be a marvel to behold — albeit remotely, given that its action will take place well beneath the surface. Burrowed hundreds of feet beneath the earth but only ten feet in diameter, the LHC tunnel will serve as the racetrack for two opposing beams of particles. Steered by more than a thousand gigantic supercooled magnets — the coldest objects on Earth — these particles will race eleven thousand times per second around the loop, traveling up to 99.999999 percent of the speed of light. Reaching energies up to 7 TeV each, the beams will be forced to collide at one of four designated intersection points.

One of these collision sites houses the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS), detector, a colossal instrument seven stories high (more than half the height of the Statue of Liberty) and spanning 150 feet (half the length of a football field) from end to end. Using sensitive tracking and calorimetry (energy-measuring) devices, it will monitor the debris of protons crashing together in its center, collecting an encyclopedia of data about the by-products of each collision. Halfway around the ring, another general-purpose detector called CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) will employ alternative tracking and calorimetry systems to similarly collect reams of valuable collision data. At a third site, a specialty detector called LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) will search for the decays of particles containing bottom quarks, with the hope of discovering the reason for the dearth of antimatter in the cosmos. Finally, at a fourth collision site, another specialized detector called ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) will be reserved for times of the year when lead ions are collided instead of protons. By smashing these together, researchers hope to re-create some of the conditions of the early universe. From each detector, based on careful assessment of the signals for possible new particles, the most promising information will be sent off for analysis via a global computing network called the Grid.

A vast group of researchers from numerous countries around the world will wait eagerly for the LHC results, hoping to find signs of the Higgs, supersymmetric companions, and other long-hoped-for particles. Discovery of any of these would spur a renaissance in physics and an enormous boost for the scientific enterprise — not to mention grounds for a Nobel Prize. The world would celebrate the achievements of those involved in this extraordinary undertaking, including the hardworking Evans and the thousands of workers contributing their vital efforts and ideas to the project.

Images: CERN

See Also:

• Last Days of Big American Physics: One More Triumph, or Just Another Heartbreak
• The Large Hadron Collider Demystified
• For Sale: $20 Million Particle Accelerator, Never Used
• Large Hadron Collider: Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios
• Large Hadron Collider Down Until 2009
• Next-Gen Atom Smashers: Smaller, Cheaper and Super Powerful

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 9 Sep 2009 | 5:54 pm

For Sale: $20 Million Particle Accelerator, Never Used

Johnnie Bryan Hunt was never the most likely candidate to breathe life into what remains of America’s unfinished multibillion-dollar science project: the Superconducting Super Collider.

The plain-talking, Stetson-wearing, born-again Arkansan multimillionaire left school after the sixth grade. He made a small fortune in poultry litter and an even bigger fortune in trucking — anyone who’s driven I-5 has most likely seen a J.B. Hunt truck, or seven.

Hunt did not use a computer. He had never sent an e-mail. Yet, at the age of 79, he sunk millions into a half-built circular particle accelerator in Texas in the hope of turning it into one of the largest and most-secure data storage facilities in America.

But this was to be only the latest in the collider’s history of disappointment. Read on for photos of the facility as it stands now and how it came to stand empty in Texas in the first place.

Photos: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 9 Sep 2009 | 5:54 pm

High-Energy Particle Physics Demystified

With the Large Hadron Collider set to start up in November, a new book takes you inside the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

Physicist Paul Halpern explores the past, present and intriguing future of high-energy particle physics in Collider. He explains what all the hubbub surrounding the LHC is about and why physicists are pretty much beside themselves with anticipation.

Wired.com spoke with Halpern about what the LHC may find and how the United States failed in its quest for its own giant collider.

Wired.com: We hear a lot about the Higgs boson and whether it will be found in the U.S. by Fermilab’s Tevaton or at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) by the LHC. What’s so great about the Higgs?

Paul Halpern: In the 1970s the Standard Model was developed, which is a way of uniting electromagnetism with the weak force. It predicts certain types of particles: the W and Z bosons as the carriers of the weak force, and the Higgs boson as a mechanism for explaining why the W and Z bosons are so much heavier than the photons, which are massless. The Higgs boson is the only known way to explain the great disparity between masses, and theoretical physics works best when you assume that all particles have equal mass.

Fields theory imagines that at some fundamental level, at highest energies all particles are essentially interacting points which have zero mass, and that somehow something created a disparity, and that was the Higgs field. The Higgs field is just something that fills up all of space, and it has a free parameter kind of like a roulette wheel that can spin in any direction.

Somehow when the temperature of the universe cooled beyond a certain amount there was a phase transition, and the Higgs field became locked in one direction, shared by the entire Higgs field across space in lockstep. Once the Higgs field locked into that phase, first of all that set the lowest energy of the universe, and secondly that energy was translated into a
mass which was given to certain particles. These were particles that interacted with the Higgs field, and these included the W and Z bosons but also the quarks and leptons that make up matter. These acquired mass, and it explains why everything around us except for photons has mass.

And just like ice freezing into patterns, the universe froze into certain patterns, and these patterns meant the acquisition of mass by certain particles. The Higgs that scientists are looking for is kind of a remnant of the original Higgs field. It’s kind of a leftover, a relic.

Wired.com: Was it worth building an $8 billion collider to find the Higgs boson?

Halpern: Well, that’s only one of the uses for the collider. Another use is to look for what are called the minimally supersymmetric Standard Model particles, which is a fancy way of saying particles that are expected to be slightly higher mass than known particles but that occupy a kind of mirror world. So in our world, photons, which are a type of boson, carry force, W and Z particles carry force, and things called gravitons and gluons also carry force. And quarks and leptons are the building blocks of matter. But there’s no reason to assume that this division always existed.

Perhaps early on in the universe, there was one type of particle which was kind of a combination of matter and force carrying particles. That would mean there must be companions of quarks and leptons which are like them but with certain opposite properties… We’re looking for the lowest energy ones because it’s predicted that some of them will have masses that might be able to be detected in colliders.

No one’s hoping to find all the supersymmetric companions, but if we could just find the lowest energy ones, then people who believe in supersymmetry will know that they’re on the right track. But so far there’s absolutely no evidence for supersymmetry and theorists have been talking about it since the 1970s. Supersymmetry plays a role in what’s called string theory too. And if supersymmetry is not true, than that rules out certain types of string theory.

Wired.com: What else could the LHC find?

Halpern: The other reason for looking for these supersymmetric companions is to try to find the elusive particles that make up what’s called dark matter. Astronomers know that much of the universe is missing. In fact, if you add up all the energy and mass in the universe, 95 percent is invisible. Only 5 percent is known visible matter including everything around us, atoms and so forth, and 95 percent is either dark energy or dark matter. Dark energy meaning repulsive type of energy which is pushing the universe apart and dark matter meaning a type of matter which is exerting a gravitational pull on galaxies but we don’t see it.

The reason astronomers believe in dark matter is because if you just take visible matter, then the stars on the edges of galaxies ought to be moving a lot slower than they are. Another piece of evidence is that galaxies ought to be less tightly clustered than they are. So for example, if you look at our galaxy and the neighboring galaxies, and you predict how much pull they should exert on each other, there’s something missing. There’s some missing glue that’s holding the galaxies together into clusters.

Wired.com: How big a blow was it to American science to lose the Superconducting Super Collider?

Halpern: I know a professor who left a long-standing tenured university position, where he was a full professor and highly respected, to get a job at the SSC. And then after resigning from his job which he had his whole life, the SSC was canceled and he couldn’t go back to his original position. He had to take a job at a small college. And I’m sure there are many stories like that. There are many people whose careers were completely severed because of the SSC, from the support staff all the way up to the professors plus students who were planning to use that material for dissertations and things like that.

It had a huge impact first of all on the perception of the United States I think. In recent years the perception that the United States is on the leading edge of science has waned, especially in high-energy physics. So Europe has renewed vigor, renewed centrality in science. And that, coupled with the unfortunate disasters and setbacks in NASA, lent a double blow to the perception of American science.

When I went over to CERN to interview scientists, I met someone who was involved with the SSC but then came over to CERN. He was very cynical about American science and said a big difference between Europe and the United States is that in the United States budgets are year to year, and in recent years there’s been no long-term commitment so there’s no kind of budget which can be planned 10 years in advance. Whereas for CERN, European governments commit a certain amount of money every year and then the CERN board decides what that money is used for. So the CERN board can plan 10 years in advance. CERN is already planning upgrades to the LHC and so forth. Whereas with the SSC everything was done year to year, and whether or not it would get funding or how much funding, that was up for grabs every single year.

Wired.com: Is the LHC the last super collider we’re going to see?

Halpern: They’re talking about a linear collider, which is the ILC, International Linear Collider. That’s in the early planning stages and that wouldn’t be a ruing that would involve two linear accelerators colliding particles with each other which would require a lot of land. But the advantage of the linear colliders is that they can narrow down the energies and thus narrow down the masses more precisely.

With the LHC they can’t really enlarge the ring or build a new ring. There’s just no room, they’re up against the mountains. So one side is the mountains, the other side is Geneva. So unless they can get rid of the mountains or get rid of Geneva there’s no place to enlarge the ring. But what they can do is replace the magnets. So they’re planning to replace the magnets sometime in the next decade and upgrade it and that will be the super LHC. And the reason that will improve things is because with stronger magnets they can improve the luminosity and luminosity means improving the chances of collision.

Wired.com: Have we ceded the lead in high-energy physics for good?

Halpern: Never say never. It could be the case that in an era in which the American budget deficit is reduced, or perhaps we even have a surplus again someday, somewhere down the line American scientists will start to push for an increase in funds toward high-energy physics. But right now the clout of high-energy physics is fairly low because of the shift towards Europe.

Unfortunately it means a lot for the American educational system. We’re going to have at least a generation of students in the United States who wont be able to have much hands-on experience with particle physics. And if they want to become a high-energy physicist, they know they’re going to have to spend time in Europe or else just be computer analysts. If they want equipment experience they’ll have to go to Europe or else they can just get data channeled from Europe to the United States and just analyze the data and do everything remotely.

So I kind of fear for the future of high-energy physics because traditionally experimentalists had a lot of hands-on experience with detectors and could produce the hardware. But then they would also get experience with the software and with the computer programming and analysis. However, nowadays it’s harder and harder for people to get detector experience because once a detector is sealed up, people can’t really interact with it. Then you have people who are in other countries analyzing the data who have very little chance of interacting with the equipment.

So what would happen is, if let’s say there needs to be a new generation of detectors or a new gen of accelerators, that there might be very little experience among the next generation of students. I think it’s gonna be a real problem because you need well-trained people in order to troubleshoot and to suggest new devices and so forth; now perhaps people will be able to do it from a theoretical knowledge from studying the older systems and so forth but I think hands-on experience has been really critical to particle physics so far. So for instance, the people who work in the LHC for the most part, the leaders there are people who worked with much smaller detectors at Fermilab and at the SPS and so forth and know exactly how everything fits together.

Wired.com: What would it mean to the U.S. if the Tevatron were to find the Higgs boson before the LHC?

Halpern: I think it would give a new boost to American high-energy physics. But it could be a short-lived boost, because then the question would be will we channel money into some kind of extension to Fermilab or a new accelerator, or will the next discoveries be in Europe?

But I think what’s going to happen ultimately is that everything’s going to be international. I think that’s the direction that big science is going, that no one country can afford projects. Countries don’t want to invest in national projects, they want to invest in international projects. That was part of the problem with the SSC. It was sort of an American project, but we wanted it to be international and we wanted to get other countries to invest in us. Whereas the ILC is genuinely international in that the site hasn’t been chosen yet and it could be any country, and countries are expected to donate; everybody who’s involved is expected to make a donation so it’s more equal.

Image: CERN

See Also:

• For Sale: $20 Million Particle Accelerator, Never Used
• Last Days of Big American Physics: One More Triumph, or Just Another Heartbreak
• An Insider’s Guide to the Large Hadron Collider
• Large Hadron Collider: Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios
• Large Hadron Collider Down Until 2009
• Next-Gen Atom Smashers: Smaller, Cheaper and Super Powerful

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 9 Sep 2009 | 5:53 pm

Vaccines could halve sickle-cell deaths in Africa

LONDON (Reuters) - Vaccination against bacterial infections using vaccines readily available in developed countries could save the lives of thousands of children with sickle-cell anemia in Africa, researchers said on Thursday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 9 Sep 2009 | 5:21 pm

Shifting seasons

Spring will arrive a month earlier in 40 years' time thanks to the warming oceans around British Isles, new study predicts

It is a discovery which should delight Britain's gardeners: by 2050, spring will start before Valentine's day. Cherry and pear trees will blossom in late January, while flower beds will be crowded with blooming buttercups, iris and geraniums long before winter has officially ended.

A new study on the impact of our warming climate has found that across most low-lying, coastal areas of the globe, spring will begin for many plants at least a month earlier than it does now and will end several weeks later in 40 years time.

The predictions are based on a detailed study of plant records from the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh (RGBE) from 1850 and weather records for Edinburgh dating back to 1775, by two scientists, Malcolm Clark of Monash university in Australia and Roy Thompson, at the University of Edinburgh.

They have confirmed that the "botanical calendar" has changed for scores of plants in the RBGE collection, which for more than 150 years has gathered plants from across the globe, are now flowering earlier as average air temperatures slowly but steadily rise. The most affected are plants such as ornamental cherry, peach and pear trees, anemones, saxifrage, irises and perennials such as three-leaved bittercress.

But Clark and Thompson warn that an ever-earlier spring is likely to create significant problems for the plants affected, for farmers and for many of the bird and insect species which rely on them.

As flowering plants move out of step, or "desynchronise", with normal seasons, serious problems may emerge with the pollination of the plants involved. They may flower before the birds and insects that feed on them, or the mammals that carry their pollen, are at large. Most animal behaviour is guided by the length of the day rather than temperature.

They believe the worst-affected places will be low-lying coastal regions of the world and places with maritime climates like the British Isles and western Europe, the Atlantic coast of north America as far south as Florida, New Zealand, Chile and north Africa.

The true start of spring is already a controversial subject. Traditionally, spring starts with the vernal equinox on about 20 or 21 March and ends with the summer solstice on 21 June, but for statistical and record-keeping purposes, the Met Office officially records spring as starting on 1 March and ending on 31 May.

But with continued global warming , these dates are likely to become even less meaningful.

In maritime areas, for every 1C of warming, flowers will bloom as if spring had begun 16 days earlier and ended 11 days later.

Using widely accepted predictions that the world's climate will warm by at least 2C by 2050, leading to warmer winters, this would mean that spring in the British Isles will no longer start on 1 March, but in late January, and end in late June.

In continental regions, further from the warming effects of the oceans, the impact will be lessened but still significant, with the flowering starting seven days sooner and ending 11 days later for every degree of warming.

"Already there is a great deal of observational evidence of regional changes in climate associated with global warming," said Clark. "We have not only seen an earlier break up of ice on rivers and melting glaciers, but also the early emergence of insects, egg laying by birds and the flowering of plants. This new model allows us to refine predictions of the future impact of warming on plant and animal life across much of the world.

"Although the study is based on plant life in Scotland, our models apply across regions spanning hundreds of thousands of square kilometres," said Clark.

But the full impact this will have on the environment is still very difficult to predict. Some plants are more sensitive to temperature changes than others; in some regions, there will be plants and trees that are not heavily affected growing alongside other plants flowering weeks earlier than normal.

Thompson also fears that the pace of climate warming is faster than the ability of plants – particularly long-lived trees - to adapt and evolve, leaving some at risk of dying out in many areas. "We're predicting very fast rates of change. In the past, plants have kept pace with the climate and after the last ice age thawed had lots of time to migrate. In the future, that's most unlikely to happen," he said. "It seems to me inevitable that they're going to be many extinctions."

He is also highly pessimistic about how much warming the world faces, which could see temperatures rising by as much as 5C by 2100 . By then, some plants will be flowering shortly after Christmas.

"I'm a geophysicist, and I've trained my students to find oil. I think they're going to find every last drop of it, and that the Chinese and Indians will extract all the world's oil and that the world's population will increase. If you believe that, the world will continue warming."

Other climate changes

Fish

Cod and haddock are just two of the North Sea fishes that have had to move scores of miles north in search of cooler waters. Sea temperatures have risen by 1C in the past 25 years and more exotic southern species have entered North Sea waters. Scientists at the University of East Anglia found that 21 species had shifted their distributions in line with the rise in sea temperature, and 18 species had moved much further north.

Trees

As climate change affects rainfall around the world, many species of trees are not able to adapt quickly enough. The dimb tree in Senegal is struggling to survive the drier and hotter conditions there and, closer to home, scientists have warned that oak trees will be severely affected if nothing is done to stem temperature rises..

Birds

The British Trust for Ornithology found that, in the period 1971-1995, 51 species of birds tended to nest and lay eggs earlier (around a week or more on average) as background temperatures increased. The species included the wren, nuthatch, starling and also waterbirds such as the oystercatcher, curlew and redshank.

Mosquitoes

The average temperature in Europe has increased by almost 1C in the past century and could rise by a further few degrees by the end of this century. The World Health Organisation has warned that malaria-carrying mosquitoes will find their way out of the tropics as the world warms and could even end up in southern England at some point.

Wine

Global warming is threatening to play havoc with the carefully managed crops in the vineyards of California and France. The warmer temperatures can mean that the grapes make their sugar too early, before the fruit is ready to be picked - this can affects the final taste and alcohol content of the wine.

Alok Jha

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Sep 2009 | 5:05 pm

UK schools minister fails to grasp fundamentals of maths

Schools minister Diana Johnson is unimpressed with research that shows children's understanding of ratio and algebra has not progressed since the early 1980s. She describes these as "topics" (Report, 5 September). Ratio is a fundamental concept that has to be understood to use mathematics in science, engineering, economics and almost any mathematics in upper secondary school and above. Algebra is straightforwardly the language of mathematics. These are crucial for further study in the same way as vocabulary is for English, or line for art. They are not "topics", and children's problems understanding them were worrying in the 1980s and are even more so now. I realise that a government which has spent millions on improving standards has to snap back at such a research finding, but at least they could snap back with some mathematical comprehension.

Anne Watson

Professor of mathematics education, University of Oxford

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Sep 2009 | 5:05 pm

BLOG: Mono or Stereo?

Will your brain prefer The Beatles' remastered albums in mono or stereo?
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Sep 2009 | 4:00 pm

Thin-Film Solar Startup Debuts With $4 Billion in Contracts

A startup with a secret recipe for printing cheap solar cells on aluminum foil debuted today, in what could end up a milestone for the industry.

Nanosolar’s technology consists of sandwiches of copper, indium, gallium and selenide (CIGS) that are 100 times thinner than the silicon solar cells that dominate the solar photovoltaics market. Its potential convinced Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to back the company as angel investors in its early days.

Two big announcements marked its coming out party: The company has $4 billion in contracts and can make money selling its products for $1 per watt of a panel’s capacity. That’s cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels in markets across the world.

Specifically, the company’s management thinks it can help utilities avoid the difficulties of getting big coal and nuclear power plants built by offering the option to build small solar farms they can set up close to cities.

“Cost-efficient solar panels such as ours can be deployed in 2- to 20-megawatt municipal solar power plants that feed peak power directly into the local distribution without requiring the expense of transmission and with a plant deployment time as short as six months,” said Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Coal or nuclear can’t do that, can’t do it as cost efficient and can’t do it as rapidly deployable.”

Thin-film solar has been a major focus of U.S. alternative energy research and development efforts since the early 1980s because it was seen as a true “breakthrough” solar technology. Silicon cells are easy to manufacture, dependable and efficient, but some researchers viewed them as inherently limited. As they are currently produced, they require a lot more silicon than thin-film solar cells. They might reach efficiency levels of over 40 percent, but they’d never compete with fossil fuel energy sources, even with carbon taxes.

Thin-film solar was different. On the one hand, it was definitely harder to make efficient cells. However, it allowed researchers to dream of printing semiconducting chemicals onto a metal sheet and having it convert photons into electricity. Thin-film cells seemed like they’d be perfect for the applications researchers imagined like “solar shingles” for building-integrated solar installations.

Thin film was promoted as the technology that would bring photovoltaics to the masses at prices competitive with fossil fuels.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory worked steadily on thin films throughout the 1990s, but no technology seemed to work well outside the lab. It turned out to be really difficult to actually manufacture thin-film solar cells.

Then First Solar exploded onto the solar scene in 2005 with a cadmium-telluride thin-film cell. Their manufacturing costs dropped rapidly and soon they had billions of dollars in contracts, largely with utilities. Yesterday, they signed a two-gigawatt deal with Chinese officials. Now, investors value the company higher than American, Delta, and United Airlines combined. First Solar has become the bar and the target for Nanosolar, and the dozens of other thin-film market hopefuls.

What could set Nanosolar apart is the way the company actually gets its semiconductors to stick to the metal foil. Most companies use various techniques executed under vacuum conditions; Nanosolar prints its solar cells.

“What separates them from the rest of the companies is that they have developed a process to make CIGS cells which involves non-vacuum technology,” said Miguel Contreras, a thin-film solar researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “This is a very generic description, but what I’m pointing out is that by having a wet chemistry process, they are able to save quite a bit of money in terms of capital equipment.”

The base for their cells — the aluminum foil — is plentiful and cheap, which the company says has cost and manufacturing advantages.

Earlier this year, First Solar claimed it started manufacturing solar cells for less than $1 per watt. Nanosolar says it can go cheaper. They also took aim at First Solar in a recent whitepaper (.pdf) for utilities, claiming their “balance-of-system costs” (all the other stuff beyond the solar cells themselves) will be lower.

It’s big talk for a company that hasn’t really entered commercial production, but Nanosolar has a half a billion dollars in venture funding and some bleeding-edge technology. Beyond the contracts they’ve won, they announced that NREL testing found their cells to be the most efficient printed solar cell on record at 16.4 percent.

Even though the competition among solar companies is heating up, there is plenty of room for multiple players in the expanding renewable energy markets. Competition can drive innovation and cost reductions, too, which would be good news for solar energy advocates. After major cost drops in the early ’90s, the average solar module’s cost hasn’t been declining very quickly.

If companies like First Solar and Nanosolar continue to grow, they will drive that average price closer to competing with fossil fuels. First Solar will be producing about a gigawatt of panels this year. Nanosolar’s production is tiny, by comparison. They have a 640-megawatt facility, and are ramping up production from their current megawatt per month of production. Scaling up can be difficult with PV technologies, but Roscheisen was confident.

“There are manufacturability issues with CIGS but you wouldn’t hit a million cells a month unless you have worked out these,” he said. “This is why our manufacturing people have considered going from 0 output to 1 megawatt a month in output as more challenging than scaling from 1 megawatt to 100 megawatts or more.”

See Also:

• Biggest Solar Deal Ever Announced — We’re Talking Gigawatts
• How to Make a Solar Cell With Donuts and Tea
• The Top 10 Utilities for Solar Power
• Utilities Jumping Into the Solar Game

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 9 Sep 2009 | 3:46 pm

Paralympian Uses Tech to Help People with Disabilities

Paralympian engineer works to bring technical assistance to people with disabilities.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Sep 2009 | 3:33 pm

Researchers find prostate cancer stem cell

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers have found a stem cell, a kind of master cell, that may cause at least some types of prostate cancer.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 9 Sep 2009 | 3:29 pm

Scientists unlock secrets of Irish potato famine genome

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Scientists have unlocked the genetic code of late blight -- the plant pathogen that sparked the Irish potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s -- and it is revealing clues about why it has been such a formidable foe.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 9 Sep 2009 | 2:31 pm

SLIDE SHOW: Refurbished Hubble Opens Its Eyes

Take a look at the sharpest images yet from the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Sep 2009 | 1:45 pm

Potato Blight Genome Reveals Wily Pest

The newly-decoded genome of the potato blight pest reveals it's a flexible foe.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Sep 2009 | 1:20 pm

Chimp's Tool Box Shows Deep Thought

An adult male chimp uses two tools to get a meal of ants. The behavior may be passed down like culture among humans.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Sep 2009 | 1:09 pm

Do Scientists and Journalists Get Along?

A new study suggests they do.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Sep 2009 | 12:54 pm

New images from a rejuvenated Hubble space telescope

Following successful repairs in May, Nasa and Esa have published pictures of the latest wonders to be revealed by the telescope

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Sep 2009 | 12:28 pm

Does Aging Cause Loss of Taste?

As we age, our sense of taste may change. Medications can contribute, too.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Sep 2009 | 11:19 am

Chimpanzees Empathize with Animated Apes

Animation of yawning apes stimulated contagious yawning in live chimps.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Sep 2009 | 11:10 am

Humans Have Made, Found or Used Over 50 Million Unique Chemicals

Humans have found or made 50 million different chemicals here on Earth, the vast majority over the last few decades.

At least, that’s how many unique chemicals are now registered in a database maintained by the American Chemical Society as of yesterday. The announcement underscores the tremendous growth of the global chemicals industry after World War II.

“A novel substance is either isolated or synthesized every 2.6 seconds on the average during the past 12 months, day and night, seven days a week in the world,” said Dr. Hideaki Chihara, Ph.D. chemist and former president of Japan Association for International Chemical Information.

The rate new chemicals are being produced and isolated is astounding. It took 33 years to get the first 10 million chemicals registered and a mere nine months to get the last 10 million chemicals into the database. In part, the acceleration is due to better tracking by the American Chemical Society, but laboratories around the world are also just producing (and patenting) a tremendous amount of molecules.

And while the Chemical Abstracts Service registry is the most comprehensive list around, there are undoubtedly more proprietary substances that remain off the books.

Image: flickr/Chemical Heritage Foundation.

See Also:

• Toxic Soup: Plastics Could Be Leaching Chemicals Into Ocean
• Self-Replicating Chemicals Evolve Into Lifelike Ecosystem
• Chemicals
• Should Government Aircraft Spray Chemicals on Residential Areas
• Sex-Changing Chemicals Make Male Starlings Sing Sweet Songs
• Breast Cancer, Common Chemicals and Cause: Better Safe Than Sorry
• Potential Neuropoison Could Be in Our Food

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 9 Sep 2009 | 11:06 am

Hubble Is Back and Photos Are Fantastic

Spectacular array of images shows off the telescope's new capabilities.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Sep 2009 | 11:05 am

Rock 'n' Roll Building Will Survive Violent Earthquakes

Engineers are designing buildings that pull themselves back into plumb as soon as the shaking stops, confining damage to replaceable steel "fuses."
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Sep 2009 | 11:05 am

Killer genes cause potato famine

Scientists publish the genome of the potato blight mould, a major cause of the Irish famine and still a big farming problem worldwide.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Sep 2009 | 11:03 am

BLOG: Will Obama Fly Commercial (to Space)?

A presidential panel says a moon/Mars plan is unlikely: time to go commercial?
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Sep 2009 | 10:55 am

Forgotten Memories Are Still in Your Brain

For anyone who’s ever forgotten something or someone they wish they could remember, a bit of solace: Though the memory is hidden from your conscious mind, it might not be gone.

In a study of college students, brain imaging detected patterns of activation that corresponded to memories the students thought they’d lost.

“Even though your brain still holds this information, you might not always have access to it,” said neurobiologist Jeffrey Johnson of the University of California, Irvine. His remarks appeared in the study he co-authored, published Wednesday in Neuron.

That recalling a memory triggers the neurological patterns encoded when the memory was formed is a tenet of cognitive science. Less understood, however, is what becomes of those patterns at moments of incomplete recall.

Maybe you remember breakfast at a certain restaurant, but not what you ate; perhaps you recall a particular conversation, but not what you said. It’s not known whether those details vanish from the mind altogether, or are subsumed by some larger pattern, or remain intact but inaccessible.

“It wasn’t quite clear what happens to them,” said Johnson of lost details. “But even when people claim that there are no details attached to their memories, we could still pick some of those details out.”

Of the the forgotten breakfast, he said that “we might still be able to pick up information about what you ate from brain activity, though you can’t access it consciously.”

Johnson’s team put eleven female and five male college students inside an fMRI machine, which measures real-time patterns of blood flow in the brain. Each student was shown a list of words, then asked to say each word backwards, think of how it could be used, and imagine how an artist would draw it.

Twenty minutes later, the researchers showed them the list again, and asked the students to remember what they could of each word.

Recollection triggered the original learning patterns, a process known technically as reinstatement; the stronger the memory, the stronger the signal.

“What I think is cool about the study is that the degree of cortical reinstatement is related to the strength of our subjective experience of memory,” said Anthony Wagner, a Stanford University memory researcher who wasn’t involved in the experiment.

But at the weak end of the gradient, where the students’ conscious recall had faded to zero, the signal was still there.

It’s possible that the students lied about what they remembered. But if not, then memory may truly persist. The question then is how long memories could last — weeks, months, even years.

“We can only speculate that this is the case,” said Johnson, who plans to run brain-imaging studies of memory degradation over days and weeks.

As for whether those memories could be intentionally guided to the surface, Johnson says that “at this stage, we’re just happy to be able to find evidence of reinstatement at a weak level. That would be something down the line.”

See Also:

• Memory Switch Could Enable Brain Hacks
• The Messy Future of Memory-Editing Drugs
• Before Memory Science, There Was Science Fiction
• Video: US Memory Champ Helps You Program Your Memory
• Think You’d Remember the Face of Your Torturer? Think Again …

Citation: “Recollection, Familiarity, and Cortical Reinstatement: A Multivoxel Pattern Analysis.” By Jeffrey D. Johnson, Susan G.R. McDuff, Michael D. Rugg, and Kenneth A. Norman. Neuron, Vol. 63 Issue 5, September 8, 2009.

Image: Dumbledad/Flickr

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes, Wired Science on Twitter.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 9 Sep 2009 | 10:14 am

Hubble Is Back! With New Stunning Images

Welcome back, Hubble.

Everyone’s favorite telescope in space is doing science again. And thanks to upgrades and repairs made in May, it’s taking better pictures of the universe than ever before.

While NASA’s future plans remain in doubt, eight new photos were unveiled today at a back-slapping, high-fiving ceremony at the agency’s headquarters. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, was on hand to lead the grand American science lovefest, with obvious enthusiasm that felt right for the occasion.

“You can count on me to continue to support NASA. We’re going to keep [going] forward,” Mikulski said. “It’s not about budgets, line items or memos. It’s about science and technology. It’s about discovery. It’s about our American character, and the future of our children.”

The 19-year-old telescope is now more powerful than it’s ever been. Two new instruments — the Wide Field Camera 3 and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph — are ready for action.

“I have a long history with Hubble and it’s been a roller coaster ride,” Mikulski said.

So do what we did: Page through the new photos, throw your hands up at your desk and yell, “Wheeeee!”

Above: Butterfly Emerges from Stellar Demise in Planetary Nebula NGC 6302

The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), a new camera aboard the Hubble Space Telescope, snapped this image of the planetary nebula, catalogued as NGC 6302, but more popularly called the Bug Nebula, or Butterfly Nebula. NGC 6302 lies within the Milky Way, roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The glowing gas is the star’s outer layers, expelled over about 2,200 years. The “butterfly” stretches for more than 2 light-years, which is about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.

Image and caption: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 9 Sep 2009 | 10:01 am

'Eureka' moment

DNA pioneer celebrates 25 years of profiling
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Sep 2009 | 9:42 am

Robot to Get Human Brain Cells

It's all cooked up in a broth of nutrients zapped by electricity.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Sep 2009 | 9:42 am

App on iPhone Warns of Nearby Flu Outbreaks

It relies on the same reports that health officials use to track disease.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Sep 2009 | 9:38 am

Superb vistas from reborn Hubble

Astronomers celebrate the release of remarkable images from the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Sep 2009 | 9:24 am

Ancient 'smell of death' revealed

Distantly-related animals all avoid a common "smell of death" that has a long evolutionary history, scientists discover.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Sep 2009 | 9:07 am

NASA Releases Hubble’s First Photo After Repair

This is the first image NASA has released from the Hubble Space Telescope since it became fully functional after being repaired by space shuttle astronauts in May.

Hubble’s newly repaired camera captured this image on June 13 and July 8 of a spiral galaxy in the Big Dipper constellation 6 million light years away.

One photo of the impact on Jupiter was released in July during testing and recalibration, but this is the first since the camera was fully operational.

Stay tuned to Wired Science for more Hubble images later this morning.

Image: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

 See Also:

• Hubble Snaps Sharpest Image Yet of Jupiter Impact
• Oh, Hubble, Can This Really Be the End?
• Hubble Snaps Image of Triple Galaxy, as Ordered by the People …
• Hubble Captures Image of Strange Giant Galaxy
• Hubble Snaps Fantastic Galaxy Collision
• Hubble Captures Images of Rare Mammoth Stars

Follow us on Twitter @betsymason and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 9 Sep 2009 | 8:11 am

Mice Levitated in Lab

The feat, done with magnetic fields, could lead to better understanding of zero-g bone loss.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Sep 2009 | 8:00 am

Infection Could Hasten Alzheimer's Memory Loss

Study finds increased memory loss in patients who have had an infection.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Sep 2009 | 7:56 am

Navy to Make Jet Fuel From Seawater

Scientists turn the carbon dioxide in seawater into jet fuel.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Sep 2009 | 7:55 am

New coral species in Galapagos

Discovery of new species raises hopes that coral reefs may be more resilient to rising sea temperatures than previously thought

Scientists have discovered three new coral species - and one that was thought to be extinct - in an extensive survey of reefs around the Galapagos Islands, raising hopes that reefs may be more resilient to rising sea temperatures than previously thought.

Honeycomb coral (Gardineroseris planulata) had apparently been wiped out in in 1997-98 by the last big El Niño event. This natural periodic event affects weather globally and another is expected this year. But the study around the relatively unexplored areas of the coasts of Wolf and Darwin islands to the north-west of the main archipelago turned up several separate colonies.

Warmer sea temperatures caused by climate change and periodic El Niño events have caused large areas of coral to be wiped out in so-called "bleaching" events. Many scientists, as reported in the Guardian last week, fear that concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are already high enough to ensure a mass extinction of coral in the coming decades.

Professor Terry Dawson of Southampton University carried out the marine survey along with scientists from the University of Miami, covering an area that had not been studied extensively by marine biologists since the 1970s. The three new coral species are from the genera Hydrozoanthus, Parazoanthus and Antipathozoanthus. They also found a fourth possible new species and other corals that were thought not to inhabit the waters around the Galapagos.

Coral reefs are formed by deposits of calcium carbonate left by successive generations of tiny polyps which feed off plankton. They also receive nutrients from symbiotic algae known as zooxanthellae which also give coral their bright glowing colours. As temperatures rise, the algae dies or is ejected by the polyps, which leads to coral bleaching. In 1982–83 an El Niño event killed off around 95% of the coral in the Galapagos and caused severe disruption to the marine ecosystem there. In 1997–98 ocean warming caused a second bout of bleaching.

Dawson, who published his team's findings in the peer-reviewed journal Galapagos Research last month, said that it appeared the algae might be adapting to warmer ocean temperatures. Sea temperatures in the Galapagos vary between 23C and 29C in normal years, but can rise to 30C in El Niño years.

"Our study might suggest that species are more resilient than we thought. Nature is quite capable of looking after itself," he said. "Humans have such short timescales in looking at things. A lot of coral dies off after an El Niño event. But we don't give species enough time to do what it needs to do. We worry about rapid climate change and its effects but some species can adapt to climate change quite quickly too."

Dawson plans to return to the Galapagos after finding evidence of a migratory corridor from the Ecuadorian archipelago, up to Panama and Costa Rica, for whale sharks (the world's largest fish), hammerhead sharks and a number of other marine animals.

Andrew Baker, assistant professor at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in Miami who led the research into the so-called algal symbionts, said he had found some evidence to suggest thermal tolerance since he started collecting data in 1998.

"Many people describe the Galapagos as nature's laboratory and that is true of its reefs too. We can look at the reef in the Galapagos and use it as a model of the system to see what reefs around the world might look like in 30-50 years," said Baker.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Sep 2009 | 7:27 am

WATCH: 'Sea Monsters' Still Exist

The Deadliest Catch captains talk about the weirdest monsters they've seen.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Sep 2009 | 7:15 am

NASA strategy proposal aims for Mars over moon

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A NASA strategy proposal shifts the U.S. human space program away from returning to the moon in favor of a stepping-stone approach aimed at reaching Mars, including using commercial space launch services, according to a document seen by Reuters.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 9 Sep 2009 | 7:05 am

New malaria 'poses human threat'

An emerging form of malaria thought only to infect monkeys poses a deadly threat to humans, research shows.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Sep 2009 | 6:45 am

Seeing is not believing

Studying paranormal claims is as much about revealing imperfections in the human mind as it is about flying saucers, ghosts, extrasensory perception and psychic healing

Having taught anomalistic psychology now for 15 years, I can vouch that it provides a fantastic way to teach critical thinking skills.

Most people, whether believers or sceptics, find paranormal and related claims fascinating. Such topics are often the focus of conversations at dinner parties and arguments in pubs, not to mention being a staple of tabloid newspapers and daytime TV. Starting from the inherent interest that students and the public have in such controversial claims, important questions can be raised regarding the most valid forms of evidence and arguments that could be put forward in support of them.

For example, most people assume that the most reliable evidence of all is that based upon personal experience. Even those sceptical of paranormal phenomena often fall into this trap. People often proclaim: "I won't believe in ghosts [or flying saucers, angels, etc.] until I see one with my own eyes." But accepting the evidence of your own eyes can be a mistake. As even brief exposure to the field of anomalistic psychology will reveal, personal experience is often a very poor guide to reality.

Both perception and memory are prone to errors. What we see and hear, especially under less than ideal observational conditions, can be heavily influenced by our prior beliefs and expectations.

Hallucinations are much more common than most people realise. Memory is also prone to errors: many of our recollections are not even distorted versions of events that we have witnessed but instead are complete fabrications. The evidence suggests that many reports of ostensibly paranormal experiences may well be based upon such false memories.

Anomalistic psychology investigates the imperfections of the human cognitive system that could lead us to conclude that we have experienced the paranormal when in fact we have not. The cognitive biases include not only those affecting perception and memory, but also those related to reasoning and judgement.

So if personal experience is not a reliable guide, is there a preferable approach? The kind of evidence that might convince me that paranormal forces really do exist is that produced by well-controlled scientific studies.

Because scientists are human beings and therefore susceptible to all of the cognitive biases referred to above, in practice the scientific method is not perfect. But it is the best approach we've got. It is the only approach to truth that I am aware of that at least acknowledges that such biases exist and attempts to control for them.

Furthermore, its reliance upon replicability, self-correction, critical evaluation by peers, and ultimately upon empirical data means that we can legitimately have a higher level of confidence in well-supported scientific theories than in other assertions about the ultimate nature of reality.

We should therefore welcome the increasing number of universities in the UK that offer anomalistic psychology as part of their BSc psychology programmes and the inclusion of anomalistic psychology as an option on the A2 psychology syllabus for A level students. Studying this branch of psychology is an excellent way to improve the nation's critical thinking skills.

However, there remain barriers to the full acceptance of anomalistic psychology as a respectable sub-discipline within psychology. One of these is simple intellectual snobbery. There are still some academics who seem to believe that any topic that is of interest to the tabloid press and to daytime TV cannot possibly be worthy of serious consideration by psychologists.

My advice to such people? Come down from your ivory towers! Psychology is about people, and most people believe in the paranormal, a sizeable minority claim to have had direct personal experience of it, and many live their lives in accordance with such beliefs.

Fortunately, this intellectual snobbery appears to be on the wane within the discipline.

There is a second barrier to the wider acceptance of anomalistic psychology. Most people do believe in the paranormal and, what is more, evidence suggests that such beliefs may, in certain contexts, provide psychological benefits.

One obvious example is the fact that people who believe in an afterlife, despite the lack of any convincing scientific evidence, will be less afraid of dying. Exposure to anomalistic psychology may not only lead people to question paranormal claims but also to question firmly held religious beliefs. One of the implicit messages of anomalistic psychology is, "Question everything – but use the appropriate critical thinking tools when doing so." For some people, this will be a challenge they prefer not to face.

For those who do accept the challenge, anomalistic psychology can be an extremely rewarding subject. The sheer range of topics covered is exceptional. At one extreme are highly entertaining accounts of the fraudulent techniques used by con artists to convince punters that they have genuine psychic powers, as well as consideration of the psychological processes that lead far more people to the mistaken but sincere belief that they themselves are psychic.

At the other extreme, some of the most profound questions that we face as human beings are addressed: Do we survive bodily death? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the solution to the mind-body problem? In between these two extremes, the nature of science and pseudoscience are considered, not to mention a wide range of fascinating topics such as alien abduction claims, psychic healing, hypnosis, ESP, psychokinesis and cryptozoology. What more could you ask for?

Chris French is a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he heads the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit. He also edits the [UK] Skeptic magazine

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Sep 2009 | 6:39 am

Rare tongue-eating parasite

A rare louse which eats fish tongues is found off Jersey.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Sep 2009 | 6:30 am

ImmunoCellular in research and license option deal with Roche

(Reuters) - ImmunoCellular Therapeutics Ltd signed a research and license option deal with Roche Holding AG, granting Roche rights to investigate the potential of its ICT-69 antibody in the diagnosis and treatment of multiple myeloma and ovarian cancer.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 9 Sep 2009 | 6:16 am

Warming Brings Poisonous Ozone Down to Earth

Climate change could drag down a cloud of poisonous ozone gas, finds research.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Sep 2009 | 5:05 am

Gecko Tail Pre-Programmed to Fool Predators

Neurons in a gecko's tail control its movements even after the tail has been severed.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Sep 2009 | 5:04 am