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Wallabies and bats harbor 'fossil' genes from the most deadly family of human virusesModern marsupials may be popular animals at the zoo and in children's books, but new findings reveal that they harbor a "fossil" copy of a gene that codes for filoviruses, which cause Ebola and Marburg hemorrhagic fevers and are the most lethal viruses known to humans.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm Brain atrophy responsible for depression in people battling multiple sclerosisAdding to all that ails people managing their multiple sclerosis (MS) is depression, which has a lifetime risk for MS sufferers as high as 50 percent. Now for the first time in living humans, researchers suggest atrophy of a specific region of the hippocampus, a critical part of the brain involved in mood and memory, among other functions, may be the cause.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm Muscular problems in children with neonatal diabetes are neurological, study findsThe muscle weakness and coordination problems sometimes seen in patients with neonatal diabetes -- a rare, inherited form of diabetes -- are caused by problems in the brain rather than the muscles, according to new research. The findings could pave the way for the development of improved treatments for the disease.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm How loss of key protein promotes aggressive form of leukemiaNew research illuminates in fine detail one of the genetic paths that leads to a particularly aggressive form of leukemia. A team discovered a new tumor-suppressing function of p53, distinct, for instance, from apoptosis, and somewhat related to senescence. They showed that it has the ability to reinforce cell-fate and differentiation programs. In AML, p53 loss leads to cancer by disabling this reinforcement.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am Nutrition's potential to save sightScientists are finding that healthy eating can reduce not only health care costs, but also the decline of quality of life due to these diseases.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am Hopes ride on giant oil skimmer in Gulf of Mexico (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jul 2010 | 1:35 am US oil spill clean-up resumes in some areas (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jul 2010 | 1:06 am Jefferson’s Hidden Change to the Declaration
Smudge analysis shows how Jefferson changed his mind.
About 80 years ago, some archivist sandwiched the pages of Jefferson’s draft between sheets of plastic. When the document was taken out of its permanent display case for a brief analysis last year, Library of Congress research scientist Fenella France noticed an uncharacteristic smudge. France had been probing the document with a new tool known as hyperspectral analysis. It uses LEDs, or light emitting diodes, to successively illuminate an object in 13 discrete bands of light; they run from the ultraviolet through the visible spectrum, and into the infrared. A 39-megapixel camera records the object under each type of light. Right away, France says, she noticed that under the different spectral bands the smudged segment of the document changed, suggesting that the top word — citizens — might be hiding something. For the longest time, she said, “I didn’t know what it was” because the two inks were very similar. Jefferson carefully wrote over the bottom word to camouflage it, she says. All she could initially see were tiny regions sticking out from below, including a “t” towards the end.
After some 10 hours or more of tricky processing carried out over a series of months, France pulled out the masked word: subjects. The revision offers a glimpse into Jefferson’s attitude as he wrote the Declaration. He rejected the idea that the colonists were traitors to King George III; they were citizens of a nascent nation. Jefferson had been copying the phrase from a newly written Virginia constitution that used the word subject. Seeing Jefferson’s rebuff of that characterization “was a spine-tingling moment,” France says. “With this new technology we never know what we’re going to find,” she says, “which reinforces that preservation of original documents is important.”
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Jul 2010 | 7:23 pm Some oil spill events from Saturday, July 3, 2010 (AP)AP - A summary of events Saturday, July 3, Day 74 of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that began with the April 20 explosion and fire on the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, owned by Transocean Ltd. and leased by BP PLC, which is in charge of cleanup and containment. The blast killed 11 workers. Since then, oil has been pouring into the Gulf from a blown-out undersea well.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 6:45 pm Tests start on "super skimmer" for Gulf oil spill (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 6:05 pm Ted – the ultimate forum for blue-sky thinkingSince 1984, visionaries in technology, science and entertainment have met at the Ted conference, to share their ideas for a happier, healthier world. Now it's coming to Oxford So, what is TED? And, more important, why should I care?For 22 years, Ted was a conference, an exclusive ideas forum where the great and the good came to hear Al Gore talk about climate change and Bill Gates about computing, right up until four years ago, when TED Talks was launched online and promptly became an internet sensation. It's a bit like YouTube, but instead of featuring cats falling into lavatories, it has short, cutting-edge talks by the world's leading neuroscientists, behavioural economists, video artists, philosophers, particle physicists, rocket scientists, endurance athletes, Aids researchers… you name it, it's been at TED. What TED does is seek out the most interesting, unusual and potentially groundbreaking ideas on Earth and then provide a platform to share them with the world. At the heart of it all are the conferences. The main event takes place once a year in Long Beach, California, and in a week's time the new, annual TED Global conference will take place in Oxford. It's a smaller, more intimate affair – 700 delegates (it's 2,000 at Long Beach) listening to 50 speakers over four consecutive days. There is no shortage of shadowy, elite conferences where masters of the universe converge on Swiss mountain tops or exclusive Mediterranean resorts in order to plot world domination (think the World Economic Forum in Davos or last month's Bilderberg Group in Sitges). TED, however, is a shadowy, elite conference where masters of the universe converge in order to plot how to make the world a nicer, fairer, better place. It's a not-for-profit foundation and it's something like the World Economic Forum might be if capitalism were replaced as the world's dominant ideological system by, say, optimism. Can TED change the world? Possibly, possibly not. But trying to tackle social problems such as eradicating world hunger or reversing climate change seems a better place to start than, say, dreaming up new ways of propping up failed financial institutions with large injections of public money. It's this mission that has helped TED attract a mix of thinkers, writers, scientists, hedge-fund billionaires, tech entrepreneurs, philanthropists and radical ideologues. And that's just the audience. The unique thing about TED is that people such as Richard Dawkins, Bill Clinton, philosopher Daniel Dennett and biologist-entrepreneur Craig Venter speak for free and people such as Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin pay to listen. It sounds awfully elitist…It is. That's the point, or at least it used to be. It's also expensive, at £3,460 a ticket for TED Global and almost £4,000 for TED in Long Beach (even a live simulcast event in Palm Springs costs £2,500), although money, in itself, will get you only so far. The main conference sells out within days of tickets being released, a year in advance, and a tough vetting procedure is enforced. To be invited, you must fill out an extensive application form, which includes questions such as what are your greatest personal achievements and how have they had an impact on society? For the first 22 years of its existence, TED was held in the chichi California seaside town of Monterey and was the hottest four-day dinner party on Earth; it was a kind of spring break for world thinkers, a place of inspiring ideas, but which only the select few would hear. But in 2006, once speaker after speaker had stood on the stage and talked about the Creative Commons licences, open-source software, the wisdom of crowds and how the internet could leverage an individual idea into a mass, public action, TED took the decision to release these talks online (at ted.com). The response has been astonishing: there are, to date, 727 talks online. Eighteen months ago, they had been viewed 50 million times; today, the viewing figure stands at more than 290 million. TED has gone viral. Ideas have become the new rock'n'roll. And TED is its Glastonbury?It is. Obscure academics toiling away in unknown research institutes have been dragged into the light and turned into superstars. Everybody at TED cites the example of Hans Rosling, a Swedish, bespectacled professor of international health whose TED talk on that unlikely hot-button topic, statistics, has now been seen by millions (a top tip to professors of international health everywhere: try underlining your final point by swallowing a sword). The talks are not constrained by national or linguistic boundaries. The Open Translation Project, launched last year, encourages volunteers to translate talks using a Wikipedia-type model; in just a year, talks have been translated into 77 languages, with 8,500 completed and another 23,000 ongoing. All free of charge. TED's new motto is "radical openness", which means that it gives away all its content free. But (and here's a trick to remember, newspaper executives), at its heart it's still exclusive and expensive. A bit of elitism, it turns out, is good for business. TED makes money, lots of money, and then tries to think up the most interesting ways of giving it away again. But brilliantly, and possibly uniquely, TED has no VIP section, no special celebtastic treatment. Last year, in Oxford, Meg Ryan and Cameron Diaz showed up and, like everyone else at the conference, had to wear massive name tags the size of a dinner plate, which said MEG RYAN and CAMERON DIAZ. Even then, at least half the audience had no idea who they actually were and mobbed the theoretical physicist standing next to them. Why the silly name?Because in 1984, when it was founded by an information architect called Richard Saul Wurman, its mission was to bring together the brightest brains in technology, entertainment and design. And this it did. At that first conference, a whizzy new computer was unveiled: the very first Apple Macintosh. And somebody brought along some funny shiny silver discs, which was how the world was introduced to the CD Rom. It was still largely about TED when, in 2001, Chris Anderson bought the organisation on behalf of his Sapling Foundation. No, this is another Chris Anderson. Although, to confuse things, Chris Anderson Mark 1 has been known to speak at TED. This is British Chris Anderson, who started out as a journalist before setting up one of the first hobbyist computer magazines, which went on to spawn a publishing empire, Future Publishing, boasting 130 magazines in Britain and America.It was when he bought TED that it began to change. Because Anderson is not your average multimillionaire entrepreneur. He was born in rural Pakistan and his parents were missionaries (his father was also an eye surgeon who worked for years in the developing world). And while sometimes the rich discover a social conscience after they've made their fortune, Anderson had one from birth. It was this, a degree in philosophy, plus some business nous and publishing experience that showed him how TED could be transformed from an elitist talking shop into a global ideas platform. Which is exactly what it has done. Anderson says it was "not a top-down plan" but a "bottom-up phenomenon". He believes it's because there was a demand for TED-type content, an appetite for ideas communicated in an inspirational way. "We put the talks out there, but it's only because people are excited by learning new stuff that it's become this amazing thing." Although there's still a techie element to TED (last year, for example, saw a demonstration of a television powered by wireless electricity), it has developed a new seriousness under Anderson. Its slogan is "Ideas Worth Spreading" and it is constantly challenging its members to apply their collective brainpower to intractable social issues. It was at TED that Al Gore first delivered the talk which became An Inconvenient Truth. In 2005, the TED prize was inaugurated. It's awarded annually to an "exceptional individual", who receives $100,000 and the support of Tedsters and the TED community to carry out "One Wish to Change the World". So far, it has spawned a Charter for Compassion, the big idea of Karen Armstrong, the former nun turned religious academic; and from EO Wilson, the scientist who coined the term "sociobiology", an Encyclopaedia of Life. This year's winner, to the surprise of those who still think of him as that puppy-faced bloke from Essex, was Jamie Oliver. His wish is to create a popular movement that will inspire people to change the way they eat. Tedsters?It's unfortunate but true. Delegates and speakers are indeed called Tedsters. Even the somewhat uncuddly ones, such as Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch. What is a TED talk?Quite apart from anything else, it's short. Each speaker has just 18 minutes to sum up their life's work or their big idea and even if your talk is about how you intend to create artificial life within five years (as I heard Craig Venter do in 2005 and which he did, bang on target, in 2010), you have 18 minutes and not a minute more. The genius of this, according to Bruno Giussani, European director of TED, is that "it's too short for an academic to do their standard 45-minute presentation and too long to improvise. You have to prepare and have to take a fresh approach. It really puts pressure on them." Or, in other words, the same old shtick will not work. Speakers have to come to TED with a new shtick. While it attracts the most stellar of international speakers, cutting-edge scientists, ex-presidents, world-class philosophers and the like, the internet is a great leveller. The greatest hits online have been people you've never heard of: the number one talk on ted.com is by the neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who grippingly describes the day when, aged 37, she had a massive stroke and, having studied the brain for her whole career, understood, even as her brain was shutting down, exactly how it was shutting down. At number five is David Gallo, an oceanographer who was also a key speaker at TED x Oilspill. TED x what?TED x is the latest unlikely but spectacularly successful grassroots innovation from TED HQ. Essentially, it's a mini-TED. Self-organised and self-supporting, anyone can apply for a licence to host one, and all TED content is free, although most of those held so far use a mixture of recorded content and their own invited speakers. It was another experimental initiative, begun in spring last year, which has snowballed into a phenomenon. As Bruno Giussani explains: "We kept on having people contacting us, saying, 'Why can't you have a TED in Doha? Or Barcelona? Or Indonesia?' And we simply can't do that. We can't expand the conferences. But we came up with this 13 months ago and we thought that there might be perhaps 20 of them." In fact, there have already been 618 TED x events in 98 countries, with another 577 planned, including TED x Tehran, which will join TED x Kibera, held in a shanty town in Kenya, and TED x Nasa, featuring a roster of rocket scientists near the Langley Research Centre in Virginia. Last year, Gordon Brown got a standing ovation. So what equally improbable feats are predicted for this year?This year's theme is the somewhat untopical "And Now the Good News". So, no, George Osborne is not a featured speaker. "Read any newspaper, or turn on any news report, and there's so much doom and gloom and cynicism," says Bruno Giussani, who has organised the programme for the event. "But we think people are looking for a new sense of possibilities; for rationally optimistic thinkers, for solutions to big and complex problems." And TED itself is proof of this, he says. It's been enabled by the new technologies, because 10 years ago, ideas simply couldn't travel so far, so fast. The ideas this year include those of Inge Missmahl, a German psychologist whose strategy for transforming Afghanistan is via the mental health of its people, and Peter Molyneux, who is revealing to the world "Microsoft's new intuitive interface". It's a techie's wet dream, hotly awaited but never before seen – a Wii, basically, with no Wii or, at least, you become the Wii, controlling a screen with your movements or facial expressions. Great, where do I sign up?It's sold out, although tickets for next year's TED Global have just gone on sale. Its theme is "The Stuff of Life". See www.ted.com for details.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Jul 2010 | 5:08 pm Malacobelemnon daytoniA new sea pen has been discovered by divers in Antarctica A new species of sea pen collected by divers off King George Island, in the South Shetlands off the Antarctic peninsula, extends our understanding of these relatives of corals and anemones. Malacobelemnon daytoni occurs at shallower depths than most sea pens. The population seems to be increasing, becoming more abundant in deeper water, possibly because they thrive in conditions of heavy silt related to glacial melt. Although not true of this new colonial species, the common name sea pen comes from related forms that are featherlike, resembling quill pens. The first specimens to reach taxonomic experts resulted from collaborative ecological research by Argentinian and Spanish scientists. Previous species in the genus were known from Australia and south-eastern Africa. Quentin Wheeler is director of the International Institute for Species Exploration, Arizona State University guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Jul 2010 | 5:05 pm Obama backs giant solar projectThe US is to give nearly $2bn in loan guarantees to two solar energy companies, creating one of the world's biggest solar energy plants in Arizona.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Jul 2010 | 4:49 pm People with depression eat more chocolate, a mood foodResearchers have found that women and men eat more chocolate as depressive symptoms increase, suggesting an association between mood and chocolate.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm Scientists uncover novel role for DNA repair protein linked to cancerResearchers report that DNA polymerase theta, or PolQ, promotes an inaccurate repair process, which can ultimately cause mutations, cell death or cancer.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm Childhood malnutrition could weaken brain function in elderlyMalnutrition early in life appears to diminish brain function in older adulthood, according to a new study that has implications for many poor, developing nations.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm Volcanic ash research shows how plumes end up in the jet streamA volcanologist has shown how the jet stream -- the area in the atmosphere that pilots prefer to fly in -- also seems to be the area most likely to be impacted by plumes from volcanic ash.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm How rules of physics in quantum world change when applied to classical worldResearchers have discovered a potentially important piece of the quantum/classical puzzle -- learning how the rules of physics in the quantum world (think smaller than microscopic) change when applied to the classical world (think every day items, like cars and trees).Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm Little-Known Fourth of July Facts (LiveScience.com)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm Little-Known Fourth of July FactsFourth of July celebrates some aspect of American Independence. Know which?Source: Livescience.com | 3 Jul 2010 | 11:55 am New US satellite to monitor debris in Earth orbit (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 10:29 am American Flag Farthest From Home Is Leaving Solar System (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - This July 4th, U.S. citizens around the world may proudly display American flags to celebrate Independence Day while away from home, but they won't hold a candle to the farthest American flag in history, which is leaving the entire solar system behind on NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 8:30 am Gemini-Titan Rocket Display Delivered to Houston Space Center (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - Scientists have discovered the first evidence of graphite on the moon — the same carbon-rich stuff used in pencils today — after taking a new look at a lunar rock collected by astronauts nearly 40 years ago.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 8:30 am Scientists peer inside a pythonScientists employ the latest imaging techniques to look inside a python that had just swallowed a rat whole.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Jul 2010 | 4:53 am Dolphin 'superpod' seen off SkyeA massive pod of dolphins thrills a group of wildlife spotters on a tourist boat trip off the north coast of Skye.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Jul 2010 | 4:09 am Moynihan, as Nixon aide, warned of global warming (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:53 am The nation's weather (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:39 am
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