New Insights Into Australia's Unique Platypus

New insights into the biology of the platypus and echidna have been published, providing a collection of unique research data about the world's only monotremes.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Nov 2009 | 12:00 pm

New Theory On Fairness In Economics Targets CEO Pay

Chief executives in 35 of the top Fortune 500 companies were overpaid by about 129 times their "ideal salaries" in 2008, according to a new type of theoretical analysis proposed to determine fair CEO compensation.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Nov 2009 | 12:00 pm

Engineers Strive To Make Algae Oil Production More Feasible

Engineers are assessing systematic production methods that could make the costs of algae oil production more reasonable, helping move the U.S. from fossil fuel dependency to renewable energy replacements.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Nov 2009 | 12:00 pm

Shedding Light On The Cosmic Skeleton

Astronomers have tracked down a gigantic, previously unknown assembly of galaxies located almost seven billion light-years away from us. The discovery, made possible by combining two of the most powerful ground-based telescopes in the world, is the first observation of such a prominent galaxy structure in the distant Universe, providing further insight into the cosmic web and how it formed.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Nov 2009 | 12:00 pm

Children Who Often Drink Full-fat Milk Weigh Less, Swedish Research Finds

Eight-year-old children who drink full-fat milk every day have a lower BMI than those who seldom drink milk. This is not the case for children who often drink medium-fat or low-fat milk, according to new research from Sweden.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Nov 2009 | 12:00 pm

Report On H1N1 Cases In California Shows Hospitalization Can Occur At All Ages, With Many Severe

In contrast with some common perceptions regarding 2009 influenza A (H1N1) infections, an examination of cases in California indicates that hospitalization and death can occur at all ages, and about 30 percent of hospitalized cases have been severe enough to require treatment in an intensive care unit, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Nov 2009 | 12:00 pm

Obesity Significantly Cuts Odds Of Successful Pregnancy, Study Finds

Obese women are as much as 28 percent less likely to become pregnant and have a successful pregnancy, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

Inefficient Selection: New Evolutionary Mechanism Accounts For Some Of Human Biological Complexity

A painstaking genomic and proteomic analysis has found a new evolutionary mechanism that accounts for some of the biological complexity of human beings. The scientists who found the mechanism say it helps humans cope with the consequences of inefficient natural selection. It fosters complexity by enabling human proteins to become more specialized over time.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

Improved Human, Object Detection Technology With New Computer Software

When searching for basketball videos online, a long list of Web sites appears, which may contain a picture or a word describing a basketball. But what if the computer could search inside videos for a basketball? Researchers are developing software that would enable computers to search inside videos, detect humans and specific objects, and perform other video analysis tasks.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

Coffee And Nighttime Jobs Don't Mix, Study Finds

Night-shift workers should avoid drinking coffee if they wish to improve their sleep, according to recent research. A new study has found the main byproduct of coffee, caffeine, interferes with sleep and this side-effect worsens as people age.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Mild weather was expected over the Central U.S. as light showers continued over the Great Lakes on Wednesday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Nov 2009 | 3:29 am

Obama urges action as Europe ups pressure on US (AFP)

AFP - US President Barack Obama stood shoulder to shoulder with Europe pressing to "redouble" efforts to combat global warming, but opponents in Congress made clear there would be no smooth path to a climate deal.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Nov 2009 | 3:05 am

Raising a wreck - HMS Victory's golden secrets could be revealed

An American salvage company hopes it will be allowed to raise the wreck of the original HMS Victory, which lies in the English Channel.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Nov 2009 | 3:04 am

Amazon road trip

BBC team make their way along controversial road
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:47 am

X-rays 'top scientific invention'

The public votes the x-ray machine as the best invention over the Apollo 10 space capsule and Stephenson's rocket.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:10 am

Vietnam storm death toll rises to 87 (AP)

AP - The death toll from Tropical Storm Mirinae rose to 87 in Vietnam on Wednesday as authorities stepped up rescue and relief operations in affected areas of the central region.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Nov 2009 | 1:45 am

Prosthetics don't give sprinters unfair advantage, study finds

Carbon-fibre blades like those worn by sprinter Oscar Pistorius do not give an edge over able-bodied athletes

Prosthetics worn by disabled sprinters confer no speed advantage, scientists have found. If anything, they may reduce the top speed a runner can achieve.

The research supports the case made by the South African Paralympic runner Oscar Pistorius, who uses flexible carbon-fibre blades in races. Pistorius has long argued that he should be allowed to compete alongside able-bodied athletes in races, but athletics authorities banned him from doing so in last year's Olympic games, claiming that his blades gave him an unfair advantage over able-bodied athletes.

But the new study by Alena Grabowski at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests the authorities may have come to the wrong conclusion.

Grabowski and her colleagues examined how six elite sprinters, each with one amputated leg, ran with their prostheses. The researchers chose sprinters with one amputation because it allowed them to compare the action of a prosthetic limb directly against a real leg.

They found that the limiting factor determining an athlete's top speed was how hard the foot or prosthesis hit the ground. Their study showed this "ground force" was around 9% lower in the prosthetic limb versus the unaffected leg. The results are published today in the journal Biology Letters.

Simon Choppin, a sports engineer at Sheffield Hallam University, said the Pistorius controversy rested on whether his prosthetics increased the efficiency of his limbs, allowing him to achieve higher speeds for less effort.

"So, simply, you can move the prosthetic quicker and you're ready for the next step faster than someone who has a leg," said Choppin. Another possible advantage was that the prosthetics might allow the athlete to get back more of the energy they put into the track compared with able-bodied athletes. "But this [Grabowski] paper suggests you're at a disadvantage if you've got one of these blades."

Choppin suggested that the lower ground force was probably due to the relative lack of muscle in an amputee's leg. Even so, this did not mean it was inevitable that amputee sprinters would be slower runners. To compensate for the lower ground force, Grabowski found that amputees typically moved their legs more quickly to generate the same amount of power.

The research may allow athletes such as Pistorius to take their place in elite races, said Choppin. "It's hopefully good evidence that able-boded athletes will be able to compete alongside amputees such as Oscar Pistorius without that stigma that amputees are at an advantage somehow. This evidence suggests in fact they're not – they're having to compensate for the lower force by running in a different way."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Nov 2009 | 1:30 am

Australian oil spill recovery plan could take 7 years (AFP)

AFP - Monitoring the clean-up of a huge oil spill in pristine Australian waters could take as long as seven years, an official said Wednesday as environmentalists urged a wide-ranging inquiry into the disaster.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Nov 2009 | 1:00 am

Astronomers see 'skeleton' of the universe (AFP)

AFP - Astronomers in Chile and Japan have for the first time seen part of the "cosmic web" of galaxies that permeates the known universe in a gigantic assembly some seven billion light-years from Earth.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Nov 2009 | 8:33 pm

Oldest T. rex relative identified

Scientists identify the most ancient fossil relative of the predatory dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Nov 2009 | 7:07 pm

Obama urges new effort on climate

Barack Obama urges the US and EU to re-double efforts to achieve success at the climate change summit in Copenhagen.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Nov 2009 | 6:10 pm

T. rex's Oldest Relative Discovered (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Spanning just 10 feet in length and sporting a tiny horn on its nose, a newly identified dinosaur has become the oldest known relative of the fierce meat-eater, Tyrannosaurus rex. The discovery suggests such tyrannosaurs were quite petite before they evolved into giant killing machines just before their demise.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Nov 2009 | 6:00 pm

T. rex's Oldest Relative Discovered

A small relative of the prehistoric killing machine lived some 170 million years ago.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Nov 2009 | 5:48 pm

Can we manipulate the weather?

Chinese scientists claim to be able to control the weather. But is so-called geoengineering more than wishful thinking? And, if so, should we be worried?

The unseasonal snow that fell on Beijing for 11 hours on Sunday was the earliest and heaviest there has been for years. It was also, China claims, man-made. By the end of last month, farmland in the already dry north of China was suffering badly due to drought. So on Saturday night China's meteorologists fired 186 explosive rockets loaded with chemicals to "seed" clouds and encourage snow to fall. "We won't miss any opportunity of artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from a lingering drought," Zhang Qiang, head of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, told state media.

The US has tinkered with such cloud seeding to increase water flow from the Sierra Nevada mountains in California since the 1950s, but there remains widespread scientific sniffiness in the west at such attempts at weather control. The chemicals fired into the sky, usually dry ice or silver iodide, are supposed to provide a surface for water vapour to form liquid rain. But there is little evidence that it works – after all, how do investigating scientists know it would not have rained anyway?

Such doubts have not stopped China claiming mastery over the clouds. Officials said the blue skies that brightened Beijing's parade to celebrate 60 years of communism last month were a result of the 18 cloud-seeding jets and 432 explosive rockets scrambled to empty the sky of rain beforehand. Last year, more than 1,000 rockets were fired to ensure a dry night for last year's Olympic opening ceremony.

"Only a handful of countries in the world could organise such large-scale, magic-like weather modification," Cui Lianqing, a senior meteorologist with the Chinese air force, told the Xinhua news agency after last month's parade.

Magic or not, there is growing interest in such attempts to deliberately steer the weather, and on a much larger scale. Next spring, a group of the world's leading experts on climate change will gather in California to plan how it could be done as a way to tackle global warming, and by whom. The ideas, some of which, similar to cloud-seeding, involve firing massive amounts of chemicals into the atmosphere, can sound far-fetched, but they are racing up the agenda as pessimism grows about the likely course of global warming.

As interest grows, so does concern about whether such techniques, known as geoengineering, could be developed and unleashed by a single nation, or even a wealthy individual, without wide international approval. "What will happen when Richard Branson decides he really does want to save the planet?" asks one climate expert. If China thinks it can make cloud seeding work, then what about geoengineering?

"If climate change turns ugly, then many countries will start looking at desperate measures," says David Victor, an energy policy expert at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Logic points to a big risk of unilateral geoengineering. Unlike controlling emissions, which requires collective action, most highly capable nations could deploy geoengineering systems on their own."

Victor is a heavyweight policy analyst, but one of his most impressive academic feats could have been to smuggle the name of the world's favourite secret agent into the sober pages of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. "Geoengineering may not require any collective international effort to have an impact on climate," he wrote in an article published last year. "A lone Greenfinger, self-appointed protector of the planet and working with a small fraction of the [Bill] Gates bank account, could force a lot of geoengineering on his own. Bond films of the future might [enjoy incorporating] the dilemma of unilateral planetary engineering." Move over, Goldfinger.

Unilateral geoengineering worries experts for two reasons. First, the massive side effects; what it could do to the world's rainfall, for example. Second, once started, geoengineering would probably have to be continued, as stopping could bring an abrupt change in climate. "One of the many dangers with unilateral geoengineering is that once a country starts, it becomes very hard to stop," Victor says. "Removing a warming mask, even if it is a flawed mask, would expose the planet to even more rapid and probably dangerous warming."

In a world where action on global warming has created new markets in carbon worth billions of pounds, countries are not the only players. Geoengineering would require investment and the private sector is already eyeing up opportunities. Two companies have emerged with a business plan based on dumping iron in the sea and then selling carbon offsets based on the extra pollution supposedly soaked up by the resulting algal bloom. And in their new book, Superfreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner talk approvingly of Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, whose company, Intellectual Ventures, is exploring the possibility of pumping large quantities of reflective sulphur dust into the Earth's stratosphere through a patented 18-mile-long hose held up by helium balloons.

This is the point where most people will shake their heads, say the whole silly idea will never happen, and skip to the crossword. They could be right, but the global warming story has a tendency to outpace most attempts to predict its path. Just a few years ago, scientists and politicians talked of the need to avoid a 2C rise in global temperature, yet experts recently gathered at an Oxford University conference openly talked of a likely 4C rise, which, without urgent and unlikely action, a new report from the Met Office says could come within many of our lifetimes.

A decade ago, an unproven idea called carbon sequestration, that would see carbon emissions from power stations trapped under the ground, was talked up by a small group of advocates, but was dismissed by most people as too expensive and unworkable on a large scale. Renamed carbon capture and storage, the idea is now mainstream energy policy in countries including Britain, despite still being unproven and dismissed by many as too expensive and unworkable on a large scale. Last month, the International Energy Agency said the world should build 100 full-scale carbon-capture power stations by 2020, and 850 by 2030.

If the geoengineering narrative follows a similar arc, then how long until nations or individuals that have the most to lose, or are the first to accept that the required massive emission cuts are impossible, turn to the presently unthinkable option? The US government, under President Bush, has already lobbied the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to promote geoengineering research as "insurance". When the Royal Society recently carried out an investigation of the options, senior figures privately expected it to dismiss the whole concept as nonsense. Instead the society, Britain's premier scientific academy, concluded in September that methods to block out the sun "may provide a potentially useful short-term backup to mitigation in case rapid reductions in global temperature are needed". The society stressed that emissions reductions were the way to go, but recommended international research and development of the "more promising" geoengineering techniques.

"My guess is that we will be taking geoengineering a lot more seriously in the next decade," says Victor, "but we won't be in a position to deploy systems for some time. Most nations will decide it is needed only if we have really bad luck as warming unfolds and if we fail miserably in controlling emissions. I put the odds of using such systems in the next 40 years at perhaps one in five."

Of all the apparent obstacles to geoengineering, cost is not likely to be among them. Compared with the expense of investing in renewable energy and phasing out fossil fuels, the cheapest geoengineering options come with a price tag of just a few billion pounds, perhaps 1% of what it could cost to tackle global warming through emissions cuts.

Alan Robock, an expert on volcanos and climate at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has looked at how much it might cost to carry out one of the most commonly discussed geoengineering options, to mimic the cooling effect of a volcanic eruption by filling the high atmosphere with sulphur compounds, which reflect sunlight.

The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 threw so much shiny sulphurous dust into the atmosphere that temperatures across a shaded Earth dropped a year later by about 0.5C. The 1815 explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia triggered the notorious "year without a summer" and widespread failure of harvests across northern regions including Europe, the north-east US and Canada.

Robock has worked out the likely cost of technology needed to deposit a million tonnes of sulphur in the stratosphere each year, an amount equivalent to a Mount Pinatubo eruption every four to eight years, and which scientists think could be enough to cancel out the global warming caused by a continued rise in carbon emissions.

The cheapest option could be to use giant mid-air refuelling aircraft, such as the US air force's KC-10 Extender, filled with sulphur dioxide or hydrogen sulphide gas. It would be a round-the-clock operation, with nine aircraft each required to fly three sorties a day. In a new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Robock and his colleagues say it could be done for "several billion" dollars a year. The results have forced Robock to revise a high-profile list of 20 objections to geoengineering he published last year. "It turns out that being way too expensive is not the case."

Robock's new analysis still includes 17 reasons why geoengineering is a bad idea. Throwing sulphur into the atmosphere could slow down the world's water cycle and do more damage to rainfall patterns than the global warming it aims to prevent. And because techniques that focus on stopping sunlight do nothing to stop carbon dioxide pollution from cars, factories and power stations, they cannot address the looming disaster of ocean acidification. The surface of the world's ocean is slowly turning to acid as our extra carbon pollution dissolves in seawater. Coral reefs already appear doomed and many shellfish could follow. Altering the atmosphere could also weaken solar power and reverse years of work to close the hole in the ozone layer.

With such a catalogue of potential disasters waiting to unfold, there must be a law against geoengineering? The international rulebook is fuzzy on this issue. The only international framework that directly covers many geoengineering techniques, the 1976 Environmental Modification Convention, designed to stop nations at war from meddling with each other's weather, has never been tested. The 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty could be used to regulate activities and experiments in those shared spaces, but releases to the atmosphere are legally more problematic because nations have sovereignty over their own airspace.

Rather than laws and treaties, many experts argue that the best way to prevent countries or companies from going it alone is to plunge in and start serious research. "The way to tame the worst forms of unilateral geoengineering is to promote a lot more research, especially [into] the side effects," Victor says. "One of the biggest dangers is that some governments will try to create a taboo against geoengineering. A taboo would stop a lot of research but it wouldn't stop determined rogues. That scenario would probably be the worst, because rogues would not abandon their efforts and the rest of us would not have done enough research to know what to expect."

Mike MacCracken, chief scientist at the Climate Institute in Washington, is organising the California meeting next spring, which aims to figure out some guidelines. He says large-scale unilateral geoengineering is "not very plausible" and his main concern is fairness to future generations. Once started by anybody, a geoengineering attempt would probably need to be continued by everybody else because it would offer a mask on global warming that could be dangerous to remove.

"It might be that this is how unilateral concerns should be reframed; this generation more or less deciding it will take only slow action on any type of emissions, essentially forcing the next generation to be more likely to have to invoke geoengineering to save much that anyone considers beneficial and unique about the Earth."

Read between the lines of most scientific reports on geoengineering and there is a tacit assumption that the idea sounds so extreme that merely discussing it will refocus efforts on emission cuts. But what if the reverse is true? What if a heavily funded research programme, and articles such as this, promote the idea to people who have little interest in moving to a low-carbon world?

"Knowledge is hard to hide," says Robock. "It would be great if people didn't know how to build nuclear bombs, but they do. We need to research and debate the consequences and then use politics and influence to let people know what would happen."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Nov 2009 | 5:05 pm

Five extreme ways to beat climate change

From virtual volcanos to space mirrors, science is exploring new ways to fend off global warming

Stratospheric aerosols

Mimics the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption by spraying shiny sulphur compounds into the high atmosphere. Relatively cheap and easy to do, though it would require non-stop effort as the chemicals gradually fall back to Earth. Possible side effects include changes to global water cycle and rainfall. Would not stop CO2 build up and subsequent effects including ocean acidification.

Plausibility: 7/10

Ocean fertilisation

Dump iron into the sea to boost plankton growth and soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Hard to do on a significant scale and could contravene international laws on ocean dumping. Doubts about how deep the plankton would sink have raised questions on how permanent a solution it would be.

Plausibility: 5/10

Cloud whitening

Fleets of sailing ships strung across the world's oceans could spray seawater into the sky to evaporate and leave behind shiny salt crystals to brighten clouds, which would then reflect sunlight back into space. Could be turned off at any time, but might interfere with wind and rain patterns. Would not address ocean acidification.

Plausibility: 6/10

Space mirrors

Seemingly straight out of Hollywood; a giant sunshade in space could block the sun. More likely to be a collection of millions or even trillions of small mirrors rather than a giant orbiting parasol. Very expensive and would require some serious rocket building to enable so many launches, which could cause problems for the ozone layer.

Plausibility: 2/10

Carbon swallowing

Artificial trees could soak up carbon dioxide from the air using a chemical process. Technically possible but very expensive on a meaningful scale. Captured carbon would still need to be disposed of. One of the few options that could turn back the clock and reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere. Plausibility: 4/10

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Nov 2009 | 5:05 pm

Pass notes No 2,677: The universe

Scientists have analysed its colour – and it's beige

Age: Approximately 13.73bn years.

Appearance: Beige.

What do you mean, beige? The universe is beige. It's been proven by science. Astrologists Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry took light measurements from more than 200,000 galaxies, broke them down into their constituent colours and then averaged the colours out to produce a single shade visible to the human eye. The result was beige.

The universe is the sum of everything that ever has been, is or will be. It's even bigger than Wikipedia. It can't just be beige. No, you're right, that's ridiculous. Which is why they came up with a special name for it: the universe is, in fact, cosmic latte.

And cosmic latte is? A shade of beige.

Right, my problem was never really what the colour was called. It was the idea that the universe, also known as everything, is a single colour. We could call it something else. They also considered skyvory, astronomical almond and primordial clam chowder.

Again, the name's not important. Univeige?

Someone really suggested that? Yep.

Sure, fine, I give up. The universe is univeige. Correct, for now, but Glazebrook and Baldry claim the universe started off blue and, as it continues to expand, is slowly getting redder.

So it'll all be cosmo-crimson? If the current rate of expansion continues,yes.

As in the phrase "Red universe at all times, shepherds go absolutely buttwild"? Sure, but at that point the stars will have cooled off, died and become black holes, which will themselves then evaporate, leaving nothing but old red light stretched across an ever-widening expanse of nothing.

So no more shepherds? Probably not.

Are there no other options? There are; the rate of expansion could increase, causing the universe to rip itself apart, or slow, causing it to collapse on itself. Shepherds would survive neither.

And I thought beige was boring. It's univeige.

Don't say: "One apocalyptic strawberry frappuccino to go.'

Do say: "It's the end of the world as we know it. And it's a sort of reddish cream colour.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Nov 2009 | 5:05 pm

Country diary: Wenlock Edge

Wenlock Edge

A band of 100 siskins flew over Lea North quarry. Low cloud and rain began to lift and the sun lit the yellow-green birds against blue-grey walls of limestone. I was part of a smaller crowd of people who had come to the quarry to contribute to a consultation process organised by the National Trust, which is negotiating with the quarry's owners to take over these big, enigmatic holes in Wenlock Edge. Different people want different things, but there was great interest in the natural processes working on the quarry. Geologists told how exposed lumps of limestone had been formed by the growth of coral reefs in patches, like those in the Caribbean but much further south and 425m years ago in the Silurian era. This highly fossiliferous limestone, wherever it occurs in the world, is called Wenlockian.

A local historian told the story of this quarry, which began in the 1940s for agricultural lime as well as aggregate; before that it had been common land. In its heyday during the 1950s, the quarries employed 150 people in a tradition that went back a thousand years or more and ended last year. There is no more quarrying on Wenlock Edge. Silenced and rusting, the conveyors slanting at odd angles around the crushing plant have that symbolic quality of pit wheels at closed coal mines. These structures, the cliff faces, the spoil heaps and ghosts are part of a legacy which is almost unknown.

Now the quarries are abandoned, the opportunities for wildlife are extremely rich. The entomologists described the bees and wasps which inhabit the dry sunny banks, which are also ideal for the rare dingy skipper butterfly and its bird's-foot trefoil food plant. Other plants of limestone grassland, purged from surrounding countryside, are recolonising from tiny fragments of the old common. All this gives the quarries an ecological significance which – whatever happens here – will, I think, be cherished.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Nov 2009 | 5:05 pm

Where Great White Sharks Lurk: Close to Home

Great white sharks tend to patrol specific neighborhoods for weeks on end, a new study finds.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Nov 2009 | 4:44 pm

Pentagon eyes crash analysis on 1,300 satellites

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Tuesday it is now tracking 800 maneuverable satellites on a daily basis for possible collisions and expects to add 500 more non-maneuvering satellites by year's end.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Nov 2009 | 4:11 pm

U.S. eyes "intent" of China's space programs

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military needs to deepen dialogue with China to better understand the intent of its space programs, a U.S. general said on Tuesday, after a Chinese commander announced plans to develop offensive military capabilities in space.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Nov 2009 | 3:32 pm

BLOG: World's Ugliest Bug Contest Underway

Find out how you can decide which insect claims the title of world's ugliest bug.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Nov 2009 | 3:15 pm

WATCH: Why Are Elections Held on Tuesday?

Find out why elections in the U.S. always take place in November on a Tuesday.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Nov 2009 | 3:15 pm

Smos satellite unfurls instrument

A European Space Agency satellite launched to study the Earth's water cycle unpacks its antenna system.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Nov 2009 | 2:03 pm

Scared of Flying? New App May Help

A new app will walk passengers through a fear of flying class.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Nov 2009 | 1:45 pm

Judge rules activist's beliefs on climate change akin to religion

Tim Nicholson entitled to protection for his beliefs, and his claim over dismissal will now be heard by a tribunal

When Rupert Dickinson, the chief executive of one of Britain's biggest property firms, left his BlackBerry behind in London while on a business trip to Ireland, he simply ordered one of his staff to get on a plane and deliver the device to him.

For Dickinson's then head of sustainability, Tim Nicholson, the errand was much more than an executive indulgence: it embodied the contempt with which his boss treated his deep philosophical beliefs about climate change.

In a significant decisiontoday , a judge found Nicholson's views on the environment were so deeply held that they were entitled to the same protection as religious convictions, and ruled that an employment tribunal should hear his claim that he was sacked because of his beliefs.

The judgment could open the door for people to take their employers to tribunals over their stance on a range of issues, from animal rights to feminism.

Earlier this year, Nicholson, 42, claimed that his beliefs had put him at odds with senior executives at his former employer Grainger, the UK's largest listed residential property company. When he was made redundant in July last year, he launched his legal action.

He alleged that while the firm had good written policies on the environment it had refused to abide by them, and claimed that when he tried to encourage the company to become more responsible, he was obstructed by his bosses. Dickinson, in particular, had shown "contempt" for his beliefs, Nicholson told the employment appeal tribunal, citing the BlackBerry incident as evidence.

In today's ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton decided that: "A belief in man-made climate change, and the alleged resulting moral imperatives, is capable if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations." Under those regulations it is unlawful to discriminate against a person on the grounds of their religious or philosophical beliefs.

The written ruling, which looked at whether philosophy could be underpinned by a scientific belief, quoted from Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy and ultimately concluded that a belief in climate change, while a political view about science, can also be a philosophical one. The same judge ruled last year that Al Gore's environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth was political and partisan as he assessed whether it should be shown to schools.

Nicholson's solicitor, Shah Qureshi, said: "This case confirms, for the ever increasing number of people who take a philosophical stance on the environment and climate change, and who lead their lives according to those principles, that they are protected from discrimination."

In March, employment judge David Neath gave Nicholson permission to take the firm to tribunal over his treatment, but the ruling was challenged by Grainger on the grounds that green views are not the same as religious or philosophical beliefs. The firm maintained that environmental views are political and a "lifestyle choice" which cannot be compared to religion or philosophy.

Legal experts said tonight the ruling could usher in future damages claims over the way firms handle environmental concerns. Peter Mooney, head of the Employment Law Advisory Service, said: "This would open the floodgates for others who believe their employers have victimised them simply because of their views on the environment."

Camilla Palmer, of Leigh Day and Co, said it opened doors for an even wider category of deeply held beliefs, such as feminism, vegetarianism or humanism. "It's a great decision. Why should it only be religions which are protected?"

At the Employment Appeal Tribunal last month, Dinah Rose QC, for Nicholson, said: "The philosophical belief in this case is that mankind is headed towards catastrophic climate change and that, as a result, we are under a duty to do all that we can to live our lives so as to mitigate or avoid that catastrophe for future generations. It addresses the question, what are the duties that we own to the environment and why?"

Nicholson, who now works for a charity promoting greener healthcare, said he was delighted by the ruling. He said: "It is the moral and ethical values that I hold that have motivated me to action on climate change and these moral and ethical values are similar to those promoted by the world's major religions."

However, he did not believe that climate change was the new religion, because "it is based on scientific evidence, not faith or spirituality".

Grainger's corporate affairs director, Dave Butler, said: "This decision merely confirms that views on the importance of environmental protection are capable of amounting to a philosophical belief.

"Grainger absolutely maintains, as it has done from the very outset of these proceedings, that Mr Nicholson's redundancy was driven solely by the operational needs of the company."

Five tests

In his written judgment, Mr Justice Burton outlined five tests to determine whether a philosophical belief could come under employment regulations on religious discrimination

• The belief must be genuinely held.

• It must be a belief and not an opinion or view based on the present state of information available.

• It must be a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life.

• It must attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance.

• It must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, not incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.

Humanism was given as an example meeting the criteria, while belief in a political party or the supreme nature of Jedi knights, from the Star Wars movies, were offered as ones that do not.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Nov 2009 | 1:42 pm

French anthropologist Levi-Strauss dies at 100

PARIS (Reuters) - French intellectual Claude Levi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology, has died at the age of 100, his publishing house Plon said on Tuesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Nov 2009 | 1:40 pm

Over 17,000 Animals Near Extinction

A tree frog and mudfish are among the more than 17,000 threatened species.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Nov 2009 | 1:15 pm

NASA Probe Sees Changing Seasons on Mercury (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - A NASA spacecraft has spotted what appears to be changing seasons on Mercury and found much more iron on the surface of the small, rocky planet than previously thought.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Nov 2009 | 1:05 pm

In the drugs debate, politicians are intoxicated by cowardice | Simon Jenkins

Nutt was the victim of an outdated taboo that neither Johnson nor Cameron appear to have the courage to challenge

Even Alan Johnson must know his sacking of David Nutt was a mistake. The boast that he was being "big enough, strong enough, bold enough" to make such decisions was a gift to the gods of hypocrisy. If he was that big and strong he would have ignored Nutt and not pretended that an academic lecture on drug classification constituted a "public campaign" against him. Nutt's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs had been humiliated by Johnson and his colleagues, and rendered virtually useless. Leave the guy alone.

It is not the mistakes politicians make that matter, but why they make them. The Labour government's drugs policy must qualify as the worst confection of unreason even in Whitehall's copious canon. This is not for want of advice or research. Few subjects have been more rigorously investigated, not least by Nutt and his collapsed committee.

We know the differential impact of narcotics on the brain. We chart the evolution of schizophrenia in drug users. We can measure harm reduction schemes across Europe. We can even balance the impact of education against deterrence in curbing drug use. When I hear of another committee, conference or seminar on drugs policy I scream: "Don't waste the money: spend it on rehab instead."

Researching drug use is pointless since policy on the subject has nothing to do with evidence, only emotion. It has to do with fear of the unknown, the taboo of other people's escapist narcotics (or worse, those of one's children). Politicians could not care less what experts say – witness this week's smattering of support for Johnson. They care only for the rightwing press, whose editors suffer a similar taboo.

The test was how the Tories reacted to Nutt's sacking. Faced with a home secretary gasping for air, Cameron and his home affairs spokesman, Chris Grayling, rushed forward with oxygen. Parting company with half the cabinet and the weight of scientific opinion, Cameron had a bad attack of funk. He refused to defend Nutt, and asserted his conviction that ecstasy was as harmful as heroin and crack cocaine. This was the same Cameron who, as a backbench member of the home affairs select committee in 2001, had supported Nutt in taking the opposite view. He must know what he said this week was rubbish.

All these politicians accept in private that the law is in chronic need of reform. Yet should they dare murmur so, they seem terrified of being assailed by the Mail, the Sun and the Telegraph. They could handle the House of Commons. They could even carry their constituents. But the rightwing press holds them in thrall, perhaps because they feel powerless before its lash. Might their youthful indiscretions be discovered, or the antics of their children pursued?

Politicians can stand the pressure of corpses piling up in Helmand, but one corpse at a rave would be too much for their consciences. Whenever I have tackled Home Office ministers, from Jack Straw and Charles Clarke to recent, less distinguished holders of the office, the response is the same. Don't even think about it, they cry. We would be crucified by the press. Just say no to drugs reform.

I served on the 2000 police foundation committee on the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, the only exhaustive study of the act ever undertaken. It was set up with the government's blessing and members included David Nutt, distinguished pharmacologists and two chief police officers. Our conclusions were mild, embracing a redirection of drugs policy towards harm reduction and a partial decriminalisation of cannabis use.

Polling evidence showed a wide gulf between a public desire for toughness on hard drugs on the one hand; and on the other, two-thirds of opinion that regarded cannabis as "least harmful". An overwhelming majority thought chasing cannabis users was "not a police priority", and a significant majority, from all ages and social groups, favoured cannabis decriminalisation. That was confirmed in other similar polls.

What happened next was a textbook case of Tony Blair's governing style. The home secretary, Jack Straw, went ape, reputedly on the instructions of Alastair Campbell, then at the height of his Downing Street ascendancy. They feared that the slightest welcome for the report's findings might have the government castigated by the rightwing press, of which Campbell lived in perpetual fear. The committee's chairman, Ruth Runciman, was summoned in advance of publication and castigated by Straw in front of his team, until Mo Mowlam had to suggest it might be better if they all read the document first.

When the report appeared it was well received. The Daily Mail, in a front-page editorial, welcomed it and said it had delivered "a mature and serious national debate". The Telegraph was even more favourable and criticised Straw for "misjudging the public mood". The head of the Metropolitan police was supportive.

In other words it was quite untrue that the public and press were opposed to drugs law reform. Realising this, Straw performed a U-turn and was induced, apparently by Campbell, to write an article full of wishy-washy assertions for the News of the World. It warmly welcomed the report and further debate. There was none. The subject was buried.

The incident was a classic example of public policy determined by ministers trying to second-guess Fleet Street. Drugs policy is desperately important. It has the power to wreck lives, families and communities. It underpins a third of crime and 80% of acquisitive crime. Four decades of illegality have done nothing to curb consumption, merely breeding the most lucrative, untaxed product market in Britain. No country has achieved the remotest success with prohibition, but Britain's archaic laws have been the least successful. Go to any deprived area, any difficult school, any failing social service, and the root cause of trouble is drugs.

There is no evidence that the public is averse to reform of the 1971 law, indeed the opposite. Why senior politicians should accord mystical influence to a few irrationalist newspaper editorialists is bizarre. Ministers and opposition leaders disregard the press on war and peace, on indulging banks, and on infringing civil liberties. The media's bluff is called every day on some topic or other – and rightly so. The press, like the pope, can field no divisions.

So what is it about drugs? Britain's deepest social problem is blighted by political cowardice towards an outdated taboo. But who will break the spell?

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Nov 2009 | 1:00 pm

CO2 from deforestation overestimated

The carbon dioxide emissions caused by the destruction of tropical forests have been significantly overestimated, according to a new study. The work could undermine attempts to pay poor countries to protect forests as a cost-effective way to tackle global warming.

The loss of forests in countries such as Brazil and Indonesia is widely assumed to account for about 20% of all carbon dioxide produced by human activity – more than the world's transport system. The 20% figure was published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 and was widely quoted after being highlighted by the Stern review on the economics of the problem. It is repeatedly used by Prince Charles and others as an incentive to push efforts to include forests in carbon trading.

Curbing emissions from deforestation is one of the main issues being discussed at a UN climate meeting in Barcelona this week, before crucial talks in Copenhagen next month.

But researchers led by Guido van der Werf, an earth scientist at VU University in Amsterdam, say that figure is an overestimate and that the true figure is closer to 12%. Publishing their analysis in the journal Nature Geoscience, they say the 20% figure was based on inaccurate and out-of-date information. "It's a tough message because everybody would like to see forests better protected and it is difficult to tell them that carbon dioxide emissions are less important than assumed. Still, the good news of lower emissions is no bad news for the forests," said Van der Werf.

The lower figure could make it harder to agree ways to reward forest protection, he said. "If you want to put a price on carbon [in forests] then you would get less carbon for your money now."

The study showed previous assessments exaggerated the rate of tropical deforestation. It also took into account soaring emissions from fossil fuel burning since 2000, which reduces the relative role of deforestation. The scientists say 12% is an estimate, and the figure could be between 6% and 17%, but that the original 20% figure was equally uncertain.

Van der Werf said an important finding of the research was the previously unquantified emissions from tropical peatlands, which they say could be as high as 3% of global CO₂ – more than the aviation industry. "The total contribution of deforestation and peatlands is about 15% and is still a substantial contribution to global CO₂ emissions, and therefore remains a significant opportunity for global CO₂ reduction," he said.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Nov 2009 | 12:49 pm

Claude Lévi-Strauss obituary

French anthropologist whose analysis of kinship and myth gave rise to structuralism as an intellectual force

The fame of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has died aged 100, extended well beyond his own subject of anthropology. He was without doubt the anthropologist best known to non-specialists. This is mainly because he is usually considered to be the founder of the intellectual movement known as structuralism, which was to have such influence, especially in the 1970s. He was one of those French intellectuals – like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur – whose influence spread to many other disciplines because they were philosophers in a much broader sense of the word than the academic philosophers of the British and American tradition.

As a result, these French writers have seemed more stimulating to some Anglo-Saxon thinkers, working in intellectually more imaginative, but perhaps less rigorous, areas such as literature, history or sociology than the home-grown product. Yet it is something of an irony that Lévi-Strauss should have been thought of in this way, as he considered himself, above all, a technical anthropologist, and he was a little surprised, if not also a little suspicious, of the enthusiasm for structuralism manifested by students of literature and others. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that he relished the literary fame that his work acquired, especially for his 1955 book Tristes Tropiques.

Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels into a family of French artists, and followed a fairly typical career for a successful French humanities student. He attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris, and then the Sorbonne, where in 1928, at an exceptionally early age and with great success, he passed the formidable philosophy agrégation examination. He consequently became a kind of high-level school teacher in Laon, in Picardy, a type of post that was often a first step towards becoming a university teacher.

He soon became disillusioned with philosophy, however, because of what he saw as its sterile self-reference and mannerisms. He especially disliked the utilitarian and moralistic forms of philosophy dominant in France at the time. For a while he also became active in the French socialist movement but, subsequently, he seems to have lost interest in politics and was surprisingly uncommitted during the dramatic events of postwar France. Instead he became interested in anthropology, after reading the American anthropologist Robert Lowie, partly because he realised that the richness of the cultures then labelled as primitive gave the lie to the optimistic evolutionism of writers such as Auguste Comte.

As a result of this interest in anthropology he was proposed by the sociologist Célestin Bouglé as a member of a group of French academics who were being seconded to the new French-sponsored University of São Paulo in Brazil. He accepted a professorship in 1935, largely in the mistaken belief that he would be able to study the Amerindians. He did attempt to carry out a certain amount of anthropological research from there, but it was difficult, and in 1939 he resigned from the post to carry out more systematic fieldwork among the Nambikwara and other indigenous peoples of the Mato Grosso and Brazilian Amazon. Although this field work has always been considered to be rather poor by many anthropologists, I find it rather impressive given the short time he spent with the Amerindians. More importantly it confirmed him in his sympathy and respect for the culture of the indigenous peoples of South America and also in his growing scepticism towards the philosophical and artistic achievements of the literate civilisations of the Old World.

This attitude must have been confirmed by the events of the second world war. First, Lévi-Strauss was called up for a very short time and experienced the humiliation of the fall of France and the armistice, and then he was faced by the growing discrimination and persecution against Jews in Vichy France. In 1941, he managed to escape and ultimately made his way to New York, where, the next year, together with other French intellectuals, he was given a post at the New School for Social Research. There, he, the theologian Jacques Maritain and others founded a kind of Free French university, the École Libre des Hautes Études. After the war he stayed on in the US until 1948, working as cultural attaché to the French embassy in Washington. On his return to France, he held a number of increasingly important posts at institutions, including the Museé de l'Homme in Paris, where he served as assistant director (1949-50), and the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he was director of studies in anthropology (1950-74). In 1959 he was elected to a chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France. Among many other honours he was, in 1973, awarded the Erasmus prize and elected to the French Academy.

It was during Lévi-Strauss's period in the US that "structural anthropology" became constructed. This led to what has come to be known as "structuralism" – a term used for a variety of theories both in anthropology and beyond, which, although they claim to be derived from his ideas, do not always bear much relation to his work. It is striking how, in spite of the immense respect with which he is treated, especially in France, he has no direct followers or students. Many claim and have claimed to be structuralists but it usually turns out that only a limited aspect of his thought has an influence on them, and at worst the adoption of the label "structuralist" was merely a matter of passing fashion. He is a lonely, if imposing, figure in the history of thought.

Levi-Strauss's own structuralism is a personal amalgam of a naturalist approach to the study of human beings and a philosophical attitude derived from this. The strictly scientific aspect was largely the result of the combination of two types of theoretical influences. The first has to do with his contact with American cultural anthropology, a relation that is ambiguous since it is so much "at a distance", as was to be his attitude to all other contemporary theoretical influences. Secondly, he came into contact with structural linguistics, a behaviouristic amalgam of European and American theories, and particularly the more imaginative work of Roman Jacobson, the Russian theoretician of language who was also at the New School at the time.

While in New York, Lévi-Strauss immersed himself in the great body of anthropological accounts of North and South Amerindians that early US anthropologists and linguists had been accumulating for more than a century. The data collected from the Amerindians and its complexity delighted him, and made him react permanently against reductionist explanations of culture, which implicitly denied the intellectual achievement that indigenous mythology and social thought represented. The contact with the structural linguists suggested to him an approach that could both generalise and remain true to the richness and specificity of the original material. Thus Levi-Strauss adopted the term "structural" from a very particular school of linguistics that flourished in the 1940s and 50s, which combined the influence of the Swiss, Ferdinand de Saussure, with that of the American Leonard Bloomfield.

The basis of the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss is the idea that the human brain systematically processes organised, that is to say structured, units of information that combine and recombine to create models that sometimes explain the world we live in, sometimes suggest imaginary alternatives, and sometimes give tools with which to operate in it. The task of the anthropologist, for Lévi-Strauss, is not to account for why a culture takes a particular form, but to understand and illustrate the principles of organisation that underlie the onward process of transformation that occurs as carriers of the culture solve problems that are either practical or purely intellectual.

For him anthropology was scientific and naturalistic, that is scientific in the way that structural linguistics had become scientific. By looking at the transformations of language that occur as new utterances are generated, by using the tools that a particular language makes available, structural linguistics was able, so Lévi-Strauss believed, to understand not only the irreducible specificities of a particular language, but also the principles that made their production possible. In this way, linguistics, as he understood it, was a branch of the humanities and a natural science that is able to connect directly with psychology and neurology.

By studying the richness of cultural forms and their continued transformations, much the same was to be achieved by anthropology, which was to be both a cognitive and a historical science. Thus, the meaning of symbols and concepts had to be studied both within the context of the working of the brain and the specificity of the historical flow of a particular culture. Anthropology was for Lévi-Strauss one of the cognitive sciences. It was to be compatible with recent discoveries concerning the working of the brain, although as time went on he seems to have given up keeping up with developments in this field. He was, however, insistent that although the cognitive could explain structure, it could not explain content.

This is the programme lying behind all of Lévi-Strauss's major works. But, in a sense, it is also a manifestation of a much more fundamental approach and mood from modern English-speaking anthropologists. In contrast to most professional anthropologists, whose work often seems contained within the controversies of their time and which lacks a general theory of human nature, Lévi-Strauss writes as though he were a naturalist from far away, observing our planet and the ecology of its different species, including the human species, with an Olympian lack of involvement.

He was thus interested in the human species in general terms but, because he knew that for 99% of its existence, humankind has consisted of small groups with very low population densities living in close interaction with a multitude of other living species, he considered the study of peoples such as the pre-contact Amazonian Indians to be far more important and relevant than the details of the short-lived modern industrialised world.

This approach led him to pay particular attention to Amerindian myths, the study of which was the subject of most of his writing since the 1960s. In particular, it is the subject of the four-volume Mythologiques (1964-71). For Lévi-Strauss, Amerindian myths are the Indian's speculation on the condition of interdependence of living things. Thus a myth about the origins of wild pigs is related to marriage rules and to another myth about the benefits of cooking.

This is, for him, a speculation not so much utilitarian as philosophical. Human thought is, of course, governed by the structuring capacity of the human brain but not explained by it. In this light, the myths are the record of the true history of the principal philosophical endeavour of mankind, and Lévi-Strauss not only wanted to record this endeavour, but also to join it. The myths' subject matter is his subject matter. Thus, this most aloof of intellectuals saw himself as a participant in the Amerindian dialogues he analysed without claiming any kind of precedence for himself. Because the myths are about the interrelationship of living things, it is essential for him to understand the natural history of all species in order to understand our own natural history.

Understanding, or participating, in the ecological reflection of humans such as the Amerindians is not only what he considered most important to study for himself as an anthropologist: it also coloured his values. These, from time to time, particularly towards the end of his life, he allowed himself to make public. He repeatedly expressed his distaste for the narrowness and sterility of much post-neolithic thought, and its obsession with the exploitation of other living things rather than simply reflecting on the latter's complexity and mutual relationships. As a result, he became something of a hero to certain modern ecological ideologues. For Lévi-Strauss, writing and formal education are just as likely to lead to philosophical impoverishment as to anything else.

There is also another, even more fundamental, way in which his thought seeks to rejoin that of the mythology of the Amerindians as he understands it to be. Myths have no authors. Their creation occurs imperceptibly in the process of transmission or transformation over hundreds of years and across hundreds of miles. The individual subject, the self-obsessed innovator or artist so dear to much western philosophy, had, therefore, no place for Lévi-Strauss, and indeed repelled him. He saw the glorification of individual creativity as an illusion. As he wrote in Tristes Tropiques: "the I is hateful". This perspective is particularly evident in his study of Amerindian art. This art did not involve the great individualistic self-displays of western art that he abhorred. The Amerindian artist, by contrast, tried to reproduce what others had done and, if he was innovating, he was unaware of the fact. Throughout Lévi-Strauss's work there is a clear aesthetic preference for a creativity that is distributed throughout a population and that does not wear its emotions on its sleeve.

This central philosophical tenet of his approach has often been forgotten, partly because of some subsequent writers, such as Foucault or Derrida, who although they acknowledged his influence, were bizarrely labelled as post-structuralists, as though they differed from him in this respect. They were then credited with the idea of the "death of the subject" while, in this, they simply followed in his footsteps. Yet, the philosophical implications of this position not only implicitly underlay so much of his thought, but were made quite explicit in the polemic against Sartre's glorification of individual choice, which forms the final part of Lévi-Strauss's most adventurous book, The Savage Mind (1962).

Of course, his theories have been much criticised, and few would now subscribe to them in the way that they were originally formulated, but nonetheless many anthropologists, including myself, are continually amazed and awed by the fact that, through the use of a theory that many consider flawed, or at least rather vague, Lévi-Strauss gained the most illuminating and unexpected insights in almost all fields of social and cultural anthropology.

Given his personality and, indeed, his theories, the extraordinary lionisation he received on the occasion of his 100th birthday seems ironic. It was as if the French establishment and the French state had decided that he was suddenly a major diplomatic asset. He had received drawers full of medals and prizes from all over the world and, as the international fame of its public intellectuals is the kind of thing France has always prided itself on, it made sure the birthday did not go unnoticed. Lévi-Strauss had become the last survivor of these great beasts such as Sartre, Foucault and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and, what was more, he was politically uncontroversial. Also, the genuine interest of the previous French president Jacques Chirac in the culture of native peoples and in the acquisition of "primitive art" encouraged this apotheosis of a person who, for the general French public represented, above all, the lure of primitive exoticism.

So, when the great date came, nearly every French magazine had his photo on the cover. President Sarkozy went to his flat to wish him a happy birthday, and the ministry of foreign affairs helped to finance seminars in his honour in places as far apart as Iceland and India. The imposing amphitheatre of the newly created collection of indigenous art at the Quai Branly museum, in Paris, was named after him. Most significant of all, a large part of his work was republished in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. This honour is normally reserved for dead greats such as Racine or Aristotle, whose writings are thereby placed in a kind of leather-bound bibliophilic mausoleum and printed on paper normally only used for bibles.

This treatment is significant because, as Vincent Debaene points out in a cheeky introduction to the volume, France much prefers to represent its scientists and thinkers as great literary figures, rather than celebrate what they said or discovered.

And indeed all this adulation hardly considered seriously the core of Levi-Strauss's work, the groundbreaking analysis of kinship systems that he published on his return to France in 1947 as The Elementary Structures of Kinship, consisting of a detailed study of those societies where family ties determine who people must marry, or the minute examinations of North and South American myth. All these public tributes seem to obscure his prime identity as a professional anthropologist struggling with the basic traditional questions of the discipline.

We do not know what he thought of all this, since by then he felt too ill to respond, but his often-expressed preference for the anonymous creator, which seems to accord so well with his personality, does not square with all this fuss. He hated public occasions and was a very private person. He loved to be out of step with the received "correct" view of the moment. He was uncomfortable with disciples and fled from adulation.

To the members of his team in Paris, the image he evoked above all was the nearly permanently closed doors of his study. This is not to say that he was in any way a recluse. He was secretly warm and had a delightful sense of humour. He was charming and very considerate and respectful towards whoever he was dealing with, irrespective of status. I remember him at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, on the occasion of his being given an honorary degree, listening to students telling him about what they got from his work and not allowing them to be interrupted by the French ambassador, who failed in the attempt to barge in and drag him away in the direction of more important guests. The nearest he approached discourtesy was a faint hint of irony, but on the whole he preferred to be alone, working, reading and accumulating ever more details about the lives of the native Americans whom he so admired.

He married Dina Dreyfus in 1932, Rose Marie Ullmo in 1946, and Monique Roman in 1954, and had a son by each of his second and third wives - Laurent and Matthieu. He is survived by Monique and his sons.

• Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropologist, born 28 November 1908; died 30 October 2009

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Nov 2009 | 12:28 pm

Darwin’s Wolf Mystery Solved

Genetic analysis of the now-extinct Falkland Islands Wolf has answered a biological riddle that caught the attention of a young Charles Darwin, and helped shape his understanding of evolution.

During his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, Darwin observed that the wolves — like his now-famous finches — varied widely in size between different islands, suggesting that the traits of species were not immutable, but changed over time in response to their environments.

Darwin also wondered at the origins of the wolves, which were unusually small, and had reddish fur and relatively short jaws. He dubbed them foxes, and was the first of many scientists to suspect that the strange canids weren’t wolves at all. Others thought they were descended from dogs brought by the islands’ first human settlers. Indeed, not a single mammal species other than the wolf was native to the Falkland Islands, located 300 miles off the southeastern tip of South America.

In a study published Tuesday in Current Biology, researchers address these questions with a genetic analysis of five museum specimens. Their findings are twofold. First, the specimens last shared a common ancestor 70,000 years ago, or a full 50,000 years before humans sailed to the Falklands; and the animals’ closest relative is the maned wolf, still found on the savannas of South America.

Moreover, the split from the maned wolf appears to have occurred 6.7 million years ago — some four million years before wolves are known to have lived in South America. At that time, maned wolves lived in North America, and it seems that all of South America’s canids originated in the north.

Unfortunately, by the time Darwin arrived in the Falklands, the wolves were being killed for their fur, and their numbers were in decline. “Within a very few years after these islands shall have become regularly settled, in all probability this fox will be classed with the dodo, as an animal which has perished from the face of the earth,” he wrote.

Forty years later, the Falklands Islands wolf was gone.

Image: From Zoology of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle

See Also:

• Pink Iguana That Darwin Missed Holds Evolutionary Surprise
• Black Wolves the Result of Interbreeding With Dogs
• Evidence for Bone-Crushing Wolves Discovered

Citation: “Evolutionary history of the Falklands wolf.” By Graham J. Slater, Olaf Thalmann, Jennifer A. Leonard, Rena M. Schweizer, Klaus-Peter Koepfl, John P. Pollinger, Nicolas J. Rawlence, Jeremy J. Austin, Alan Cooper, and Robert K. Wayne. Current Biology, Vol. 19 Issue 20, November 3, 2009.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecosystem and planetary tipping points.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Nov 2009 | 12:24 pm

Claude Lévi-Strauss dies aged 100

Structuralist thinker is credited with revolutionising the study of anthropology for the 20th century

France was paying tribute tonight to one of its greatest intellectuals, the social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has died at the age of 100.

The structuralist thinker, who devoted his five-decade career to the study of the human species around the world, is credited with having revolutionised the study of anthropology for the 20th century.

A statement from Paris's School for the Advanced Studies of Social Sciences said Lévi-Strauss had passed away at the weekend. He was less than a month from marking his 101st birthday.

Tonight tributes poured in from across France. Foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said Lévi-Strauss stood out not only for his scholarly accomplishments but also for his "moral convictions". "[He] broke with an ethnocentric vision of history and humanity," Kouchner said. "At a time when we are trying to give meaning to globalisation, to build a fairer and more humane world, I would like Claude Lévi-Strauss's universal echo to resonate more strongly."

Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, perpetual secretary of the Académie Française, of which Lévi-Strauss was a member, praised his "extraordinary openness of spirit". "He was a thinker, a philosopher ... We will not find another like him," she told French radio.

Born into a wealthy French-Jewish family in Brussels in 1908, Lévi-Strauss went on to become one of the most influential thinkers of his generation in Europe. His structuralist method, in which he searched for the underlying patterns in outwardly diverse social rituals and mythology, led him to study the differences- and similarities- between western countries and American Indian and Amazonian tribes.

His career blossomed in the 1950s with the publication in 1955 of Tristes Tropiques, a book hailed by many as one of the greatest works of the century. In it, he predicted the eventual demise of the human race. His theories, espoused in a series of highly acclaimed publications including The Savage Mind and the four-part Mythologiques, led to him taking his place in the pantheon of France's great 20th century thinkers.

He was cited by fellow thinkers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, locked horns with Jean-Paul Sartre over the existentialist's notion of personal freedom, and was praised by Simone de Beauvoir for his then-radical interpretation of women's role in human kinship.

In 1970, Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach described Lévi-Strauss as "the most distinguished exponent of this particular academic trade to be found anywhere outside the English-speaking world."

Old-age led him to regard humanity with the 'serene pessimism' which he characterised as his attitude to life. Asked by French radio on his 100th birthday last year, he said he would have preferred to let the occasion pass by unmarked. "Birthdays at this age have no longer have any raison d'être because there is no reason to celebrate a further step into physical and intellectual degeneration," he said.

Perhaps in a reflection of this desire for a lack of show, Philippe Descola, who succeeds Lévi-Strauss at the head of the social anthropology laboratory at the prestigious Collège de France, said his funeral had already taken place in Burgundy, before his death had been made public.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Nov 2009 | 12:23 pm

Middle-Aged Wolves Retire From the Hunt

Middle-aged and older wolves tend to leave the hunting to their younger counterparts.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Nov 2009 | 12:15 pm

Anthropologist Levi-Strauss dies

Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, one of the most influential French thinkers of the 20th Century, dies aged 100.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Nov 2009 | 12:05 pm

Russia Leads Nuclear Space Race After U.S. Drops Out

The Russian space agency may build a nuclear-powered spacecraft with the blessing of the country’s leader, Russian and international media reported Thursday.

The craft would cost $600 million and Russian scientists claim it could be ready as early as 2012.

“The idea [of nuclear-powered spaceflight] has bright prospects, and if Russia could stage a breakthrough it could become our main contribution to any future international program of deep space exploration,” Andrei Ionin, an independent Moscow-based space expert, told Christian Science Monitor.

Building a nuclear-powered spacecraft is feasible, said Patrick McDaniel, a nuclear engineer and co-director of the University of New Mexico’s Institute for Space and Nuclear Power Studies, but probably not in the short time frame that the Russians have proposed.

“To have a test article that they could test on the ground, that’s very reasonable,” McDaniel said. “To have a completed system, that’s highly unlikely.”

If the spaceship actually gets built, it would complete a half-century quest to bring nuclear power to space propulsion, beginning with a 1947 report by North American Aviation to the Air Force.

It’s not hard to see why engineers would want to use nuclear power. Fission reactors provide a lot of power for their size, which is a key attribute in designing space systems. One engineer claims nuclear rockets are inherently twice as efficient as their chemical brethren. Their attributes could have increased the exploration range of the space program, nuclear propulsion advocates argue, allowing us to get to more interesting places.

“We could have done a lot more things in space. We could have gone more places,” McDaniel said of nuclear rocket research. “It’s highly likely we would have gone to Mars.”

The current plans to potentially return to Mars do not include a nuclear rocket, but several decades of plans from the 1950s through the 1980s just assumed that nuclear power would be a part of the effort to reach the Red Planet.

Toward that end, the Air Force, which preceded NASA in managing space programs, created Project Rover in conjunction with Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The goal of Rover was to develop a reactor that could be used for propulsion. Various incarnations of the reactor the scientists developed, called Kiwi, were tested at Jackass Flats, Nevada (see video). The idea behind the reactor was to use the heat generated by fission to heat hydrogen, which would expand, generating the force to push the rocket.

None of the reactors ran for more than eight minutes, but they were considered to have met their goals. Technically, they worked.

Though the exhaust from the rockets is radioactive, the first serious program to build a nuclear-powered rocket, Project Rover, enjoyed broad government support, even after it hit some cost overrun problems in the early 1960s.

“Everyone likes Rover — the White House, the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,” Time magazine wrote in 1962. “Senator [Clinton] Anderson insists that nuclear-powered rocketry is as important to U.S. security as the hydrogen bomb.”

Beginning in July 1958, with the creation of NASA, work on nuclear rockets became the provenance of the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office. They began to consolidate the various programs, creating the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application program.

Further reactor and nuclear rocket development occurred under NERVA. Several other reactors and rocket designs were tested, most successfully the Phoebus and XE-Prime. There were test failures, but the programs, overall, are considered technical successes.

Beyond the nuclear rocket designs, the United States also launched a small nuclear reactor, SNAP10a, into space that generated electricity. It orbited for 43 days before a non-reactor-related technical failure shut it down. (See the video for an animated explanation of the project.)

Later, the concept was largely abandoned just because no one really knew what to do with a nuclear reactor in space.

“Snap 10A was a technology demo, the question was then, well, what do we want to do with it?” McDaniel said. “And no one had a really good answer.”

Other, more fanciful nuclear propulsion ideas were proposed, too. One, Project Orion, would have been powered by nuclear bombs. The physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked on the project, told The New York Times Magazine he saw it “as the solution to a problem. With one trip we’d have got rid of 2,000 bombs.”

“Orion was a delightful scientific exercise, but not very feasible,” McDaniel said.

These various technologies cost money to develop, of course, and the scale of the cash that flowed their way shows how seriously Americans took nuclear propulsion. Between 1955 and 1972, the United States spent more than $1.4 billion in then-year dollars on developing nuclear rockets and related technologies. At the end of that period, when the Nixon administration cut NASA’s budget generally and NERVA’s specifically, the United States was well on its way to developing nuclear power for spacefaring and space purposes.

“It is indeed remarkable that the adoption of the Rover–NERVA database, upgraded and modernized by current rocket-engine technology, would fully satisfy NASA’s space transfer propulsion and long-distance exploration requirements and permit realization of a safe and low programmatic risk development programme,” wrote Stanley Gunn, who worked on the nuclear propulsion program for Rocketdyne, in a 2001 article for Space Policy.

There were several attempts to resurrect nuclear propulsion of various types, most recently the mothballed Project Prometheus. None, though, have garnered much support. One major reason is that NASA picks its propulsion systems based on its targets — and true exploration of the solar system and beyond hasn’t really been a serious goal, the Constellation plans for a return to the moon aside.

“The destinations dictate the power system,” said Rao Surampudi, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer who works on the development of power systems.

By and large, it’s cheaper and easier to go with solar power or very low-power radioisotope generators like the one that powers the Cassini mission.

McDaniel agreed that the targets drive things, citing the general decline of pure technology development research at NASA.

“Until we commit to going back to Mars, we’re not going to have a nuclear rocket,” McDaniel said.

Or perhaps a new nuclear-powered Russian spacecraft could get anxious minds at the Pentagon and NASA worrying about the need to keep pace with the Ivanovs.

After all, the Soviet nuclear rocket program may have been more advanced than the American efforts at the time of the USSR’s collapse.

Images: 1) A NERVA test engine going to the testing spot./NASA. 2) A proposed nuclear rocket to Mars rendering./NASA.

See Also:

• Space Industry Wants Nuclear Power; Public Fear Persists
• Поехали! Russia Plans Atomic-Powered Spaceship
• Aug. 22, 1962: First Nuke-Powered Cargo Ship Docks
• Mars Nukes Is Good Nukes
• Aug. 4, 1977: All U.S. Energy Placed Under Single Roof
• Laser-Powered Aircraft Are The Future of Flight. Maybe

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 | 3 Nov 2009 | 10:27 am

Kilimanjaro Ice Fields Set to Disappear

The ice fields could be completely gone within two decades and perhaps even sooner.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Nov 2009 | 10:25 am

Spaceman

Jason and the quest for European space funding
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Nov 2009 | 10:13 am

Bite Marks Show T. Rex Teens Fought Viciously

Fossil remains reveal that young T. rexes enjoyed a little roughhousing.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Nov 2009 | 9:50 am

Space Junk Could Be Tracked Like Vultures

Dangerous debris near rocket launches could be tracked in real time by combining tricks from particle colliders, moon landings and vulture tracking, a new study finds.

In a paper to be published in Acta Astronautica, physicist Philip Metzger of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and colleagues describe a technique to plot the paths and determine the densities of worrisome detritus kicked up during launch. This method could help flight engineers know instantly which pieces of debris threaten the spacecraft.

“We combined together two different types of software that can do on-site analysis,” Metzger says. “In the future we can take video of the launch environment, and the software can automatically … conclude what were the sources and the makeup of the debris.” The paper was published online at arXiv.org on October 22.

“For manned missions, this is very important. I’m surprised it’s not been done yet,” comments Nilton Renno of the University of Michigan, who studies how rocket plumes from Mars landers affect the Martian surface. “It will improve our confidence in the assessment of potential damage, not just for the space shuttle but for any other future spacecraft.”

In 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia was damaged by a dislodged piece of insulation. The damage caused the shuttle to break apart upon reentry, killing all seven astronauts on board. The event showed how crucial it is to catch debris damage early.

The need for better tracking systems during launch was highlighted during the Space Shuttle Discovery launch in May 2008, when several thousand bricks blew out the end of the flame trench under the shuttle. Simultaneously, a mysterious piece of debris flew high into the air near the shuttle, apparently from the flame trench. Had the mystery object been a brick, it could have damaged the shuttle and put the crew at risk.

To identify the object, Metzger and colleagues took advantage of NASA’s bird watching system. In 2005, during the first launch after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, a shuttle was threatened by another flying menace: a vulture that smacked into the external tank during takeoff.

Since then, engineers have tracked vultures as a routine part of launch by taking pictures of the launch area from two different angles. Combining the pictures gives a three-dimensional view of the region, so moving objects like birds and bricks can be found and followed. Metzger and colleagues have used similar measures to model how a rocket plume could scatter dust and boulders in the low-gravity environment of the moon, threatening nearby lunar outposts.

For the May 2008 Discovery launch, Metzger’s team used images from the vulture-tracking system to plot the mystery object’s trajectory, then did some simple ballistics analysis to figure out the object’s density. Neither technique is complicated or new, but the combination of images and ballistics had never been used for launch analyses before.

“We’re not the first people to study this by a long shot,” Metzger says. “All we’ve done is developed a new technique that seems to be very useful and very fast.”

The object was too light to be a brick, but it was the same density as a piece of foam from a solid rocket booster. “At no point was the orbiter in any danger” from the foam, says Bob Carilli a coauthor of the study and engineer with NASA contractor United Space Alliance.

Now that they’ve shown that the method works, Metzger and colleagues hope to speed the system up with tricks from particle colliders. Particle colliders automatically flag collisions that look interesting and store data for further inspection. NASA could use similar techniques to target only the potentially dangerous launch debris.

“The objective is not to study the individual particles that result from the collision, but rather to burrow down into the originating event,” Metzger says. “That’s our ultimate objective too.”

The system will be used on the next launch. “We’re using it right away. We’ll use it routinely from now on, whenever we analyze debris,” Metzger says. “Now that the software’s been written and debugged, it only takes a couple hours to do the whole process, which is a big improvement.”

Images: NASA

See Also:

• How to Track Space Junk Online
• Lost in Space: 8 Weird Pieces of Space Junk
• Space Junk Forcing More Evasive Maneuvers
• Shuttle Dodges Space Junk Risk
• Open Data: Shuttle Impacts From Space Junk

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Nov 2009 | 9:39 am

Over 1,000 fish species 'threatened with extinction' (AFP)

AFP - More than 1,000 freshwater fish species are threatened with extinction, reflecting the strain on global water resources, an updated global "Red List" of endangered species showed Tuesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Nov 2009 | 9:39 am

How the World's Largest Cruise Ship Floats

This giant vessel follows the same physical principles as small ships.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Nov 2009 | 9:16 am

Caffeine Cuts into Sleep, Even Hours Later

Drinking coffee to get through the night shift may have consequences on sleep.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Nov 2009 | 9:16 am

Poor Memory Linked to Risky Behavior in Youth

Children with memory problems are more likely to engage in risky behavior.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Nov 2009 | 9:15 am

Iraq signs mega oil deal with BP and CNPC (AFP)

AFP - Iraq formally signed a deal with Britain's BP and China's CNPC on Tuesday to almost triple production at a giant southern oilfield.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Nov 2009 | 8:27 am

Snows of Kilimanjaro May Soon Be Lost

The Kilimanjaro glaciers are shrinking, as the ice at their edges melts due to warming.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Nov 2009 | 8:15 am

Health Benefits of Moderate Drinking Challenged

Moderate alcohol consumption has long been associated with good health, but a new study finds that part of the reason for the good health might be other factors.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Nov 2009 | 8:01 am

How to Keep Planes From Colliding With Lasers

Beaming high-powered lasers into the sky allows scientists to study changing weather patterns, pollution in the Earth’s atmosphere and even gravity on the Moon. But if one of those helpful lasers happens to cross paths with an airplane, it can temporarily blind or distract the pilot and potentially cause a crash.

The current method to avoid plane-laser collisions is decidedly low-tech: Federal Aviation Administration regulations require anyone who’s sending a laser up into the atmosphere to employ multiple human observers, called “spotters,” to watch for planes flying within 25 degrees of the laser beam. Now, researchers have created a radio-tracking device that can perform the same task as a pair of eyes, without the potential for human error.

“The two-spotter system is a problem because spotters can forget to set their alarm clocks, they can get sick, they can get confused about the schedule, and then suddenly you don’t have two spotters anymore and you can’t operate your program,” said physicist Tom Murphy of the University of California, San Diego, who is co-leading the radio-detection project.

In addition, Murphy says spending all night watching the sky for airplanes can be a cold and windy experience. “I think we have concerns, and the FAA certainly has concerns, about the attention and the wherewithal of spotters,” he said. “An automated system would be vigilant, wouldn’t get tired, and as long as you have checks that it’s working as you expect, would be highly reliable.”

The new plane-spotting device takes advantage of air-traffic control systems carried by nearly all types of aircraft. Using two radio antennae with different beam widths, researchers can track the constant radio emissions from these systems and figure out when a plane is getting too close for comfort.

“The FAA suggests that an angle of about 15 degrees is about where you better start worrying,” said engineer Bill Coles, who co-designed the radio system. But because the strength of a radio signal drops off quickly with distance, the device can’t judge how close a plane is getting based on the power of a single radio signal. Instead, the researchers compare signals from two antennae, one with a beam width of 15 degrees and one with a much wider beam width.

“We point both antennas in the direction of the laser beam, and then we check the relative power,” Coles said. “If the power in the narrow-beam antenna is greater than the power in the broad-beam antenna, we know it must be within 15 degrees of the beam — that works no matter how far away the aircraft is because it’s a ratio of the powers.”

So far, the researchers have tested a prototype of the device on two laser telescopes, one at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico and the other at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego. After collecting nearly a year’s worth of data at Apache Point, the group posted their results on the open-access repository arXiv.org.

“Any time the telescope is open, whether or not the laser is on, we’re collecting loads and loads of information on what the system sees,” Murphy said. So far, they’ve compared the radio system to observations made by human spotters — and every plane identified by human eyes has also been detected by the radio device.

Eventually, the researchers hope to get the device sanctioned by the FAA as an alternative or addition to human spotters. First, however, they want to cross-check their data with records kept by the FAA, to make sure they’re not missing any airplanes, including those that might have been overlooked by human eyes.

Detecting every at-risk plane is important because, like any powerful laser pointed in the wrong direction, research lasers can cause temporary or permanent damage if flashed into the eyes. According to a FAQ on the FAA site, “the temporary adverse visual effects may include distraction, startle, glare, flashblindness, and/or afterimage.” And during critical tasks like take-off and landing, the FAA says even a brief flash of laser light can be enough to cause an accident.

Indeed, more than a thousand incidents involving lasers and airplanes have been documented since 2004. Most of the recent incidents have involved laser pointers directed either intentionally or unintentionally at aircraft during takeoff and landing — for example, one malcontent with a laser pointer targeted 12 planes trying to land at a Seattle airport in February.

Although the researchers said they don’t know of any airplane accidents specifically caused by research lasers, the near-constant use of these powerful instruments makes safety a prime concern.

“Sending lasers through the atmosphere is probably happening somewhere in the world,” Murphy said, “at any given time.”

Via Technology Review

Image: A telescope at NASA Goddard sends a green laser up to the moon to track lunar spacecraft, Tom Zagwodzki/Goddard Space Flight Center.

See Also:

• Laser Pointers Fired at Aircraft Creating a Huge Safety Risk
• DIY Laser Market Exploding, Cosmetic Surgeons Not Happy
• Lasers Can Chill Stuff Super Fast
• Stupid Laser Tricks: Make Your Own Piece of Jesus-Miracle Toast
• Picture: Lasers Hit Greek Riots (Updated)
• Energy of the Future: Igniting a Star With Laser Light

Follow us on Twitter @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Nov 2009 | 7:48 am

Huge Galaxy Cluster Hints at Universe's Skeleton

Newfound cluster of galaxies hint at structure of the universe's cosmic web.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Nov 2009 | 7:43 am

Deep Space Objects Guide Earth’s GPS System

Quasars used as signposts to measure positioning of GPS satellites.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Nov 2009 | 7:42 am

Science chief backs cannabis view

The UK's chief scientist says he supports the former chief drugs adviser's scientific standpoint on cannabis.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Nov 2009 | 6:42 am

Aluminum Fuel Could Power Future Space Trips

A new nanoscale aluminum fuel could power rockets to the moon and beyond.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Nov 2009 | 6:40 am

Over 17,000 species threatened by extinction (AP)

AP - A rare Panamanian tree frog, a rodent from Madagascar and two lizards found only in the Philippines are among over 17,000 species threatened with extinction, a leading environmental group said Tuesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Nov 2009 | 6:38 am

Remote Albatrosses Feed on Ocean Garbage Patch

Albatross chicks are dining on a massive, floating garbage patch in the Pacific.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Nov 2009 | 5:00 am

Pig DNA mapped: may help with vaccines

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An international team of researchers said Monday it had mapped the DNA of a domestic pig, work they say could help lead to better breeding techniques as well as improve vaccines against diseases such as swine flu.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Nov 2009 | 2:39 am

One of Tsavo's lions ate mostly human prey

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Two man-eating lions terrorized Kenya during the building of a railroad bridge over the Tsavo River in the late 19th century, but only one was making regular meals of human prey, researchers said on Monday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Nov 2009 | 2:39 am

Basketball player gets rabies vaccine after catching a bat

San Antonio's Manu Ginobili is vaccinated against rabies after catching a bat during an NBA game on Halloween.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Nov 2009 | 2:14 am