Children have a negative impact on physical activity among individuals with heart disease, study finds

A study conducted at the Montreal Heart Institute has shown unexpectedly that living with children is linked to a reduction in physical activity. Carried out with 756 participants, the study assessed the impact of social networks on exercise, revealing that people with heart disease who live with children exercise less than those people who do not live with children.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Cassini sees moon building giant snowballs in Saturn ring

While orbiting Saturn for the last six years, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has kept a close eye on the collisions and disturbances in the gas giant's rings. They provide the only nearby natural laboratory for scientists to see the processes that must have occurred in our early solar system, as planets and moons coalesced out of disks of debris.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Getting angry can help negotiations in some cultures, hurt it in others

Getting angry might help you get your way if you're negotiating with European-Americans, but watch out -- in negotiations with East Asians, getting angry may actually hurt your cause. That's the conclusion of a new study on how people from different cultures react to anger in negotiations.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

By 'putting a ring on it,' microparticles can be captured

To trap and hold tiny microparticles, engineers have "put a ring on it," using a silicon-based circular resonator to confine particles stably for up to several minutes. The advance could one day lead to the ability to direct, deliver, and store nanoparticles and biomolecules on all-optical chips.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Nanotechnology: Scientists construct molecular 'knots'

Scientists have constructed molecular "knots" with dimensions of around two nanometers -- around 30,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Bone cells' branches sense stimulation, when to make new bone

Research of bone cells shows, for the first time, the part of the cells that sense mechanical stimulation and signal the release of bone-growth factors.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

New way to target viruses could make antiviral drugs more effective

Scientists have developed a new way to target viruses which could increase the effectiveness of antiviral drugs. Instead of attacking the virus itself, the method developed at the University of Edinburgh alters the conditions which viruses need to survive and multiply.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Expedition to Mid-Cayman Rise identifies unusual variety of deep sea vents

The first expedition to search for deep-sea hydrothermal vents along the Mid-Cayman Rise has turned up three distinct types of hydrothermal venting, report marine biologists. The work was conducted to search extreme environments for geologic, biologic, and chemical clues to the origins and evolution of life.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Drilling down to the nanometer depths of leaves for biofuels

By imaging the cell walls of a zinnia leaf down to the nanometer scale, energy researchers have a better idea about how to turn plants into biofuels. A team has used four different imaging techniques to systematically drill down deep into the cells of Zinnia elegans.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

New genetic marker of ovarian cancer risk discovered

Researchers have identified a genetic marker that can help predict the risk of developing ovarian cancer, a hard to detect and often deadly form of cancer.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Showers and thunderstorms were expected to continue throughout the East on Wednesday as a nearly stationary front continued bringing instability to the atmosphere.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 4:00 am

Telescope Images Most Massive Stars Ever Found

Images from the Very Large Telescope in Chile capture the most massive stars ever found, including one twice as large as the current accepted limit for stellar birth weights. This super massive star, called R136a1, is 265 times the mass of the sun, and was as much as 320 times the mass of the sun when it was born.

This book-of-records-worthy star was found in the young stellar cluster RMC 136a, colloquially known as R136. It is located 165,000 light-years away inside the Tarantula Nebula, in one of our neighboring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The star is already a little over a million years old, and has spent most of its life shedding material through powerful stellar winds and outflows of gas. It has lost a fifth of its initial mass.

Astronomers had previously believed that the upper limit on stars’ masses at birth was 150 solar masses, but four stars in the cluster had birth weights well above that limit. Although the cluster houses more than 100,000 stars, those four giants account for nearly half the wind and radiation power of the entire group.

This trio of images shows a visible-light image of the Tarantula nebula as seen with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope (left) along with a zoomed-in visible-light image from the Very Large Telescope (middle). A new image of the R136 cluster, taken with a near-infrared instrument on the Very Large Telescope, is shown in the right-hand panel, with the cluster itself at the lower right.

Below, an artist’s conception shows the relative sizes of stars, from red dwarfs of about 0.1 solar masses, yellow dwarfs like the sun, blue dwarfs weighing eight solar masses, and the approximately 300-solar-mass R136a1.

Images: 1) ESO/P. Crowther/C.J. Evans. 2) ESO/M. Kornmesser

See Also:

• Massive Star Blows Fancy Hourglass Nebula
• Telescope Finds Galaxy’s Most Massive Star Yet
• Cascade of Star Formation Captured in Omega Nebula
• Early Galaxies Formed Stars Fast Because They Had More Gas
• Cosmic-Ray Mystery Traced to Star-Birth Frenzy

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 Jul 2010 | 4:00 am

Astronomers detect 'monster star'

The most massive star ever seen has been observed by an international team using the Very Large Telescope facility in Chile.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 21 Jul 2010 | 3:34 am

Astronomers zoom in on 'monster' stars

Astronomers discover the most massive stars to date, one which at birth had more than 300 times the mass of the Sun.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 21 Jul 2010 | 3:19 am

Relief tunnel should reach Gulf well by weekend (AP)

AP - Three months into the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the federal government's spill chief says a relief tunnel should finally reach BP's broken well by the weekend, meaning the gusher could be snuffed for good within two weeks.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 2:46 am

Police: 2 killed in Russian power station attack (AP)

AP - Two carloads of assailants attacked a hydroelectric station in southern Russia early Wednesday, killing two workers and setting off bombs.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 1:43 am

BP gains confidence in oil well cap (AFP)

AFP - BP said it was gaining confidence in the cap over the ruptured Gulf of Mexico oil well, as plans took shape Wednesday to seal the blown-out well for good.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 1:36 am

Obama, Cameron navigate Lockerbie, BP rows (AFP)

AFP - President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron worked to patch up the "special relationship" between London and Washington as the leaders sidestepped political minefields over the BP oil spill and the Lockerbie bomber.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 1:34 am

Dead penguins wash up on Brazil's beaches

Scientists suspect starvation from changing water temperatures or overfishing after 500 birds found in 10 days

Hundreds of penguins that have apparently starved to death are washing up on the beaches of Brazil, worrying scientists who are investigating what exactly killed them.

About 500 penguins had been found in the last 10 days on Peruibe, Praia Grande and Itanhaem beaches in São Paulo state, said Thiago do Nascimento, a biologist at the Peruibe aquarium.

Most were Magellan penguins migrating north from Argentina, Chile and the Falkland Islands in search of food in warmer waters.

Many are not finding it: autopsies done on several birds have revealed their stomachs were entirely empty – indicating they likely starved to death, Nascimento said.

Scientists are investigating whether strong currents and colder than normal waters have hurt populations of the species that make up the penguins' diet, or whether human activity may be playing a role.

"Overfishing may have made the fish and squid scarcer," Nascimento said.

Nascimento said it was common for penguins to swim north at this time of year. Inevitably some get lost along the way or die from hunger or exhaustion and end up on the Brazilian coast far from home.

But not in such numbers – Nascimento said about 100 to 150 live penguins show up on the beach in an average year and only 10 or so dead ones. "What worries us this year is the absurdly high number of penguins that have appeared dead in a short period of time."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Jul 2010 | 12:41 am

China oil pollution worries grow

Pollution worries and fears of a disruption to oil supplies increase, after a large pipeline blast in eastern China.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 21 Jul 2010 | 12:32 am

Top 10 Longest Living Animals

The Top 10 longest living animals are named.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 12:11 am

UK to open Earth observation hub

Science minister David Willetts is to announce a new UK centre, to be based in Oxfordshire, for monitoring the Earth from space.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 20 Jul 2010 | 11:04 pm

Global asbestos trade

Why the toxic mineral is still being sold
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 20 Jul 2010 | 10:05 pm

Stone Age Carving: Ancient Dildo? (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Sex toys have come a long way since the Stone Age - but then again, perhaps not as much as we might think.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Jul 2010 | 9:05 pm

Lost in the ice

Canadian archaelogists in new hunt for Franklin expedition ships
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 20 Jul 2010 | 9:00 pm

Petition seeks to have wolves howl across US (AP)

AP - Tens of thousands of gray wolves would be returned to the woods of New England, the mountains of California, the wide open Great Plains and the desert West under a scientific petition filed Tuesday with the federal government.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Jul 2010 | 6:58 pm

Dead penguins washed up in Brazil

Scientists in Brazil are worried after hundreds of penguins are washed up dead on the country's beaches.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 20 Jul 2010 | 6:41 pm

Long-lived Salamanders Offer Clues to Aging

The blind creatures can live more than 100 years, and their genetics could hold clues for humans.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Jul 2010 | 5:51 pm

EPA takes new look at gas drilling, water issues (AP)

AP - So vast is the wealth of natural gas locked into dense rock deep beneath Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia and Ohio that some geologists estimate it's enough to supply the entire East Coast for 50 years.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Jul 2010 | 5:49 pm

Don't let the phoney melanoma scare keep you out of the sun

There are many good reasons why we won't – and shouldn't – give up our tan

Kira Cochrane asks "why can't we give up the tan?" (Going for the burn, G2, 7 July). The answer is simple: we are not convinced that the alleged harm outweighs the obvious benefits, and we dislike the bullying, fear-mongering campaign against sun exposure.

Skin cancer statistics are used to scare, not educate. Almost all of the 84,000 skin "cancers" that appear each year are in fact benign: they don't spread or kill; their cancerous name is a historical misnomer. Of course, sun exposure increases facial wrinkling, as does smoking, but the black ace in the fear game is melanoma, because the real thing is vicious.

As the article tells us, Cancer Research UK say the incidence of malignant melanoma has "quadrupled in Britain in the last 30 years". But if this were so we would have seen coffin-loads of consequences by now. We haven't, and in a recently published large UK study (British Journal of Dermatology, 2009), I and my colleagues showed that the reason mortality has not increased with incidence is that the tumours reported are actually benign; they are not true malignant melanomas. Our explanation of the phoney melanoma epidemic is "diagnostic drift which classifies benign lesions as … melanoma", a misdiagnosis "driven by defensive medicine, an unsurprising response to its commercialisation".

The recategorisation by the International Agency for Research on Cancer that Cochrane quotes, which gives sunbeds "the same high risk … as cigarettes and asbestos", is absurd. The field is an unreliable mess of conflicting conclusions, and the claim of a special risk for younger people, which the article repeats, is now denied. But critically, since we now know incidence is invalidated by classifying benign disease as malignant, until diagnosis is improved only studies of melanoma mortality are acceptable; and the few that have been done show that melanoma mortality actually decreases after UV exposure!

The poor relationship of melanoma to cumulative UV dose had solarphobics running for cover in the idea the article quotes, that a one-off sunburn "could develop into a melanoma". But that doesn't happen: unlike the benign tumours that really are caused by UV, melanomas do not predominate in sun-exposed skin. There are commonsense reasons to avoid sunburn, and for use of sunscreens – but not, as Cochrane implies, to prevent melanoma, for which they have been shown to be ineffective.

Cochrane wonders why "we still associate tanned skin with good health", but there are many good reasons. Although the medical uses that gained Niels Ryberg Finsen a Nobel prize have long past, there are newer uses in photo-chemotherapy, dermatology and psychiatry.

Self-image is measurably increased by a tan, and we will learn much from understanding the mechanism of this wellbeing. UV initiates the synthesis of vitamin D, essential for our bones, and sunscreen promotion has led to problems. It also has a profound effect on our immune function. Strangely, the bastard science of descriptive epidemiology that masterminded the melanoma myth now claims that UV lowers the incidence of many internal cancers and melanoma, thereby outweighing any harmful effects.

Plants and animals owe their existence to the sun, and it is hardly surprising that we've learned to adapt and use it. That's why we can't give up our tan, and more importantly why we shouldn't try.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Jul 2010 | 5:05 pm

'Human Fish' Breaks Lifespan Record

This small, blind salamander can live to be over 100 years old, easily outlasting other amphibians.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Jul 2010 | 5:00 pm

Wildlife in war

Conservation on the real front line - of armed conflict
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 20 Jul 2010 | 4:43 pm

Success at last for anti-HIV gel

Vaginal gel cuts HIV infection in women by half.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/2RgFMySG4o0" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 20 Jul 2010 | 4:33 pm

UK government warned over 'catastrophic' cuts

Royal Society predicts 'game over' for British science.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 20 Jul 2010 | 3:52 pm

New Cell Network Doesn't Depend on Towers

Wi-Fi-enabled technology doesnt’t require cell phone towers or other vulnerable equipment.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Jul 2010 | 3:33 pm

Amazon drought raises research doubts

Studies highlight uncertainties over effects of climate change.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 20 Jul 2010 | 3:23 pm

Navy Shoots Down Robotic Aircraft with Laser Beams

The navy is testing out a Laser Weapons System.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Jul 2010 | 3:21 pm

Animal rights 'terror' law challenged

Targeted researchers support the legislation, despite free-speech concerns.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 20 Jul 2010 | 3:13 pm

Collider gets yet more exotic 'to-do' list

The Large Hadron Collider could throw up evidence of new physics earlier than expected.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 20 Jul 2010 | 3:13 pm

WSI cuts U.S. hurricane forecast to 19 named storms (Reuters)

Reuters - Private weather forecaster WSI Corp cut its forecast for named storms in the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season on Tuesday, but still sees an active season with water temperatures and wind conditions conducive to violent storms.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Jul 2010 | 3:01 pm

Neptune's Cold Case: Shot by a Comet 200 Years Ago?

After some clever detective work, astronomers think Neptune was hit by a large comet... two centuries ago.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Jul 2010 | 2:50 pm

To Researchers, Space Samples Are Well Worth The Cost of Fetching (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - If a Japanese space capsule that recently returned to Earth is found to have collected particles from a billion-year-old space rock, it will join the short history of lucrative sample-return missions.  
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Jul 2010 | 2:00 pm

Sarah Palin: getting the Humpty | Sarah Churchwell

Sarah Palin may irk language scholars. But her portmanteaus put her in esteemed company

Let's be honest: we've all done it. I once published a piece describing a movie star as having "fizzled around the edges" with energy. It took my mother asking if I hadn't meant "fizzed" instead of "fizzled" to point out the error. Being my mother, she loyally assumed it was a typo, or someone else's error, but embarrassingly, it was all mine.

That said, I also didn't pretend that my mistake put me on par with Shakespeare. But what Sarah Palin lacks in vocabulary, she compensates for in audacity. After saying that she "refudiated" the idea that her Tea Party supporters are racist, and repeating that New Yorkers should "refudiate" a proposed mosque, Palin then miscorrected herself, saying they should "refute" it. In fact, New Yorkers can neither refute nor repudiate the mosque, as it hasn't said anything. But let's not get sidetracked by the actual meaning of words.

This misstatement has become an international story because Palin defended it on the basis that English is a living language, and that both George W Bush and Barack Obama have been guilty of similar solecisms, with "misunderestimate" and "wee-wee'd up", respectively. After putting herself in presidential company, she finished by pointing out that Shakespeare liked to invent words too.

Whether Shakespeare invented or was just the first to record them is nearly impossible to prove, but the OED credits Shakespeare with the first documented uses (in their modern meanings) of "arch-villain", "time-honoured", "inauspicious", "sanctimonious" and "trivial". Dozens of other words and phrases are credited to him as well, but I chose these because they aptly suggest the various responses to this tempest in a teapot, and reminded me of schoolroom vocabulary tests where children are instructed to use new words correctly in a sentence. To wit: those for whom Sarah Palin is an arch-villain respond in time-honoured ways to her mangling the language, arguing that it makes an inauspicious start to a presidential bid. Those determined to defend Palin will continue to insist that her opponents' tendency to be sanctimonious about trivial matters is a foregone conclusion (Othello).

Those who think that's all Greek to her (Julius Caesar) are letting the wish be father to the thought (2 Henry IV). Palin does, it's true, often sound like Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, who responds to the accusation that he is an ass by blustering: "Dost thou not suspect my place? Dost thou not suspect my years? O that he were here to write me down an ass. But masters, remember that I am an ass." In fact, Palin has even more cause to be likened to one of Sheridan's characters, the immortal Mrs Malaprop from The Rivals.

But the truth is that in so far as she ended her tweet with a cheerful admonition to celebrate the protean nature of English, Palin is quite right. Sneering at her gives further ammunition to those apologists who accuse her critics of being pedantic and overeducated. Palin's consistent defence of her own ignorance is terrifying, but this is a flimsy example; she has offered many more robust ones.

Did Palin but know it, another esteemed cultural figure offers a better defence of her tendency toward malapropism (sorry, neologism) than Shakespeare. Refudiate caught our collective imagination because it is what Humpty Dumpty calls a "portmanteau word" in Through the Looking-Glass. Alice attempts to argue with Humpty over his creative lexicon, and Lewis Carroll gives Humpty the last word: "'When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master – that's all.'"

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Jul 2010 | 1:00 pm

Nobbled by a spider

Was it the 'biting spider' that left me unable to walk – or the 'walnut orb-weaver'?

Arachnophobes, look away now. On Saturday evening, while at my friend's back-garden barbecue, I was bitten by a spider. I felt a sharp sting – like a needle piercing the skin – and shook my leg to rid myself of the offending creature, which scuttled away so quickly that I forgot to scream.

But the bite remained: a bloody, fang-shaped puncture, which the following day caused my ankle to swell to such a size that I am now unable to walk on it, and have been prescribed a seven-day course of antibiotics. Repeat after me: Ow, ow, ow!

"Only 10 species out of the 650 spider varieties in the British Isles actually bite," says Stuart Hine, an invertebrates expert at the Natural History Museum, when I ring him hoping to identify my assailant. And, he says, even those bare their fangs only very rarely – Hine sees around 50 spider-bite cases a year, most of which result in nothing worse than an itchy pinprick. I have, he says, been unlucky.

"Spiders only bite if they're what I call 'compromised' – if you brush their web or step on them," Hine says. "They don't run around looking for a nice bit of leg to bite on." That's not much consolation.

My symptoms are, apparently, synonymous with the bite of the steatoda nobilis or – what else? – "biting spider", a variety of false widow that was introduced to southern England 100 years ago from the Canary Islands, and has now made its way as far north as London. Or it could have been the poetically named "walnut orb-weaver", which scampers forth from its silky cocoon at dusk, and whose fangs exude a potent venom designed to kill moths.

So what to do if you too fall prey to a spider bite? If you're feeling brave, try to capture the spider in a jar, so you know what you're dealing with. Rub the bite with antihistamine cream, and talk to your GP. But before you flee all parks and gardens for the duration of the summer, remember: a lot of spider bites actually happen at home. In bed. While you're asleep . . .

PS Suck up a spider!

Remove pesky arachnids without harming them with the Bug Wand. Sadly, larger varieties do not always fit.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Jul 2010 | 1:00 pm

A laser that works when wet

Super-weapon has long featured in science fiction – but now it's for real

When it comes to sci-fi villains, few have endured as well as the Martians, whom HG Wells depicted wielding a weapon called the Heat-Ray in The War of the Worlds, back in 1898. This was a small, box-like case emitting a "beam of light and intense heat" so powerful that "whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch".

Unsurprisingly, this super-weapon, capable of killing any human target and destroying all mechanical objects, caught the imagination of the reading (and, later, viewing) public. Ray guns (Dan Dare), deathrays, phasers (Star Trek), laser pistols (Lost in Space), plasma rifles, blasters (Star Wars): we've known and loved them all, in fiction. Only now, reader, they're for real.

At the Farnborough Airshow in Hampshire, the American firm Raytheon has unveiled its Laser Close-In Weapon System (LCIWS). This is a solid-state laser whose 50kw beam is capable – and the company has video film to prove it – of shooting down, from a couple of miles away, an unmanned aerial vehicle. In May, the system, mounted on a US warship, shot down four UAVs off the coast of California. You don't get much more real than that.

Rather more prosaically, Raytheon apparently developed the system after bolting together six bog-standard commercial lasers used in the car industry. "This was a bad day for UAVs, and a good one for laser technology," Raytheon Missile Systems' vice-president, Mike Booen, told a presumably excited audience at the show. On board a ship, he said, the laser can be mounted inside and the beam fed up through fibre cables; on land, it could be trailer-mounted and used "across the globe" to target mortars and rockets. This is, says the editor of Jane's Defence Weekly, the beginning of a new era in missile technology.

The system's sheer power helps overcome two problems that have long hindered laser weaponry: it works in wet weather (rain and damp marine air have previously absorbed much of the laser's energy), and it can destroy even targets fitted with reflective surfaces. "Set phasers," as the good Captain once said, "to 'Kill'."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Jul 2010 | 1:00 pm

Dead Sea Scrolls Made Locally, Tests Show

Proton analysis shows the dead sea scrolls' chemistry matches that of the water in the area where the ancient document was found.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Jul 2010 | 12:42 pm

Stone Age Carving: Ancient Dildo?

Sex toys have come a long way since the Stone Age – but then again, perhaps not as much as we might think.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Jul 2010 | 12:25 pm

Michelangelo Artfully Hid a Brain Stem in God's Throat

Digital analysis unveils the odd anatomy hidden in a Sistine Chapel fresco.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Jul 2010 | 12:25 pm

Physicists Tame Time Travel by Forbidding You to Kill Your Grandfather

Novelists and screenwriters know that time travel can be accomplished in all sorts of ways: A supercharged DeLorean, Hermione’s small watch and, most recently, a spacetime-bending hot tub have allowed fictional heroes to jump between past and future.

But physicists know that time travel is more than just a compelling plot device — it’s a serious prediction of Einstein’s general relativity equations. In a new study posted online July 15, researchers led by Seth Lloyd at MIT analyze how some of the quirks and peculiarities of real-life time travel might play out. This particular kind of time travel evades some of its most paradoxical predictions, Lloyd says.

Any theory of time travel has to confront the devastating “grandfather paradox,” in which a traveler jumps back in time and kills his grandfather, which prevents his own existence, which then prevents the murder in the first place, and so on.

One model, put forth in the early 1990s by Oxford physicist David Deutsch, can allow inconsistencies between the past a traveler remembers and the past he experiences. So a person could remember killing his grandfather without ever having done it. “It has some weird features that don’t square with what we thought time travel might work out as,” Lloyd says.

In contrast, Lloyd prefers a model of time travel that explicitly forbids these inconsistencies. This version, posted at arXiv.org, is called a post-selected model. By going back and outlawing any events that would later prove paradoxical in the future, this theory gets rid of the uncomfortable idea that a time traveler could prevent his own existence. “In our version of time travel, paradoxical situations are censored,” Lloyd says.

But this dictum against paradoxical events causes possible but unlikely events to happen more frequently. “If you make a slight change in the initial conditions, the paradoxical situation won’t happen. That looks like a good thing, but what it means is that if you’re very near the paradoxical condition, then slight differences will be extremely amplified,” says Charles Bennett of IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

For instance, a bullet-maker would be inordinately more likely to produce a defective bullet if that very bullet was going to be used later to kill a time traveler’s grandfather, or the gun would misfire, or “some little quantum fluctuation has to whisk the bullet away at the last moment,” Lloyd says. In this version of time travel, the grandfather, he says, is “a tough guy to kill.”

This distorted probability close to the paradoxical situation is still strange, says physicist Daniel Gottesman of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. “The thing is, that when we modify physics in this way, weird things end up happening. And that’s kind of unavoidable,” he says. “You’re dealing with time travel. Maybe you should expect it to be weird.”

In an earlier paper posted in May at arXiv.org, Lloyd and his team present an experiment designed to simulate this post-selection model using photons. Though the team couldn’t send the photons into the past, they could put them in quantum situations similar to those that might be encountered by a time traveler. As the photons got closer and closer to being in self-inconsistent, paradoxical situations, the experiment succeeded with less and less frequency, the team found, hinting that true time travel might work the same way.

The experiments were meant to simulate freaky paths through spacetime called closed timelike curves, which carry anything traveling along them into the past and then back to the future. Einstein’s equations predicted that travelers on a closed timelike curve would eventually end up back where they started. Although predicted to exist on paper, no such paths have been observed in the wild. Some physicists predict that these loops might exist in exotic regions where spacetime is drastically different, such as in the depths of black holes.

Despite its strange predictions, the new model forms “a nice, consistent loop,” says theoretical physicist Todd Brun of the University of Southern California. The new papers make up “a really interesting body of work.”

These days, deciding which theory of time travel is best is largely a matter of taste. Until someone discovers a closed timelike curve in the wild, or figures out how to build a time machine, no one will know the answer, says Brun. “I don’t expect these will be tested anytime soon. These are ideas. They’re fun to play with.”

Image: Flickr/jcoterhals

See Also:

• What Is Time? One Physicist Hunts for the Ultimate Theory
• A User’s Guide to Time Travel
• Free-to-Play Time Paradox Shows Risks of Time Travel

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 20 Jul 2010 | 12:16 pm

China is 'number one energy user'

China overtakes the United States to become the world's biggest energy consumer for the first time, a new report says.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 20 Jul 2010 | 11:54 am

Abe Lincoln Doc Survived Donner Party Ordeal

Documents riding with the ill-fated Donner Party yield new clues about Lincoln's life.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Jul 2010 | 11:45 am

Prey Fish Turns Predator

The bearded goby is eating its jellyfish predators off the coast of Africa.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Jul 2010 | 11:20 am

Video: Moon Builds Snowballs in Saturn Ring

One of Saturn’s moons is building enormous snowballs in the gas giant’s famous rings. Images from NASA’s Cassini orbiter show how icy particles in Saturn’s thin F ring clump together in snowballs up to 12 miles in diameter as the moon Prometheus swings around the ring.

“Scientists have never seen objects actually form before,” planetary scientist Carl Murray of Queen Mary, University of London said in a press release. “We now have direct evidence of that process and the rowdy dance between the moons and bits of space debris.” Murray presented the findings July 20 at the Committee on Space Research meeting in Bremen, Germany, and they appeared in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 14.

The images, taken over six years of observations, show an F ring that never looks the same twice. The ring is flanked by two small “shepherd” moons, Prometheus and Pandora, which are thought to herd bits of ice and dust into the ring and give it its bow-like shape.

The new observations show that Prometheus — ironically named for the Greek figure who stole fire from the gods and brought it to mortals — is primarily responsible for building miles-wide snowballs in the ring. The potato-shaped moon, which is about 92 miles across, flies around Saturn at an orbit just outside the slower-moving F ring.

The moon laps the same spot on the ring every 68 days. The repeated tugs from the moon’s gravity slosh the particles around in a pattern of increasing complexity, letting particles build up and clump together (see animation above).

“Some of these objects will get ripped apart the next time Prometheus whips around,” Murray said. “But some escape. Every time they survive an encounter, they can grow and become more and more stable.”

The largest of these objects are 12 miles across, and could be about as dense as Prometheus itself — about one-fourteenth the density of Earth. The objects are large enough to hold themselves together with self-gravity, and grow by pulling other particles to themselves.

Saturn’s rings are a mini-laboratory for studying how planets and moons coalesce from debris disks around stars.

“The new analysis fills in some blanks in our solar system’s history, giving us clues about how it transformed from floating bits of dust to dense bodies,” said planetary scientist Linda Spilker at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a press release. “The F ring peels back some of the mystery and continues to surprise us.”

Image: A composite of 10 photos taken in July 2008 shows fan-like structures in the F ring that suggest the presence of additional objects inside the ring.
Image and Video: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

See Also:

• Cassini Skims Through Titan’s Upper Atmosphere
• Cassini Gets Life Extension to Explore Saturn Until 2017
• Cassini Captures First Video of Extraterrestrial Lightning
• Cassini Spacecraft Spots New Object in Saturn’s Rings
• Cassini Photo Gallery: The Month in Saturn

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 20 Jul 2010 | 11:18 am

Can chilli balls stop stampeding elephants?

Farmers in Cameroon express doubts over a UN suggestion to use pepper spray to stop stampeding elephants destroying their crops.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 20 Jul 2010 | 11:09 am

Geoffrey Dutton obituary

Biomedical researcher and wide-ranging author and poet

The poet and scientist Geoffrey Dutton, who has died aged 85, took the same meticulous care of his words as he did his molecules. His poems – lean, profound and impersonal – are impossible to place in a tradition, unless it is that of Emily Dickinson, who was also too original to appeal to her literary contemporaries. Typical of Geoffrey's ability to imply much by saying little is the poem minimal (1978), which describes the impact of man's presence on the planet in the simplest of images:

it is only the simple sunlight

on a fence post

out of the snow.

and I come to set it upright

at the cost

of a single blow.

then I leave them to the sunlight.

one straight post,

trodden snow.

Geoffrey John Fraser Dutton – GF for poetry, GJ for scientific articles, GJF for essays on horticulture and forestry – was born in Chester. His father was a pharmacist and came from an old Cheshire family, but his mother and grandmother were Scottish; it was this Scottish inheritance Geoffrey chose for himself.

After attending King's school, Chester, he spent two war years as an officer trainee in the army before enrolling at Edinburgh University, where he took a bachelor's degree in biological science in 1949. He stayed on as a teaching fellow, completing a PhD on the enzymic formation of glucuronides (achieving high honours and the Royal Society of Edinburgh's Gunning prize) in 1954.

Geoffrey was offered fellowships in London and jobs in the US, but opted for a research professorship at Queen's College, Dundee, then part of St Andrews University. In 1957, he married Elizabeth Caird. By 1959, the Duttons were building their own house, of Scandinavian design and simplicity, on a gift of marginal farmland in Perthshire.

Geoffrey's biomedical research, which included examining the different ways in which babies and adults metabolise pharmaceuticals, was as pioneering as his poetry. He specialised in glucuronic acid, which is derived from glucose and detoxifies poisonous substances in the liver. At Dundee, his work led to the biochemistry department's international influence and reputation. A paper in the British Journal of Pharmacology credited Geoffrey's research with transforming his chosen specialism "from being a revolutionary novelty to one of the cornerstones of drug metabolism".

As an undergraduate at Edinburgh, Geoffrey had joined the Scottish Mountaineering Club, and in 1960 he became editor of the SMC Journal, a post he held until 1971. He wrote a series of hilarious climbing tales, collecting them in two popular volumes, The Ridiculous Mountains and Nothing So Simple As Climbing. In 1997, both volumes were packaged together as The Complete Doctor Stories. In 1972, he published a book on wildwater snorkel swimming called Swimming Free: On and Below the Surface of Lake, River and Sea. Until he joined an informal poetry group in Dundee to read and discuss work in progress, he kept his poetry to himself.

One day in the autumn of 1973, this soft-spoken, middle-aged man appeared in my writer-in-residence's office at Dundee University carrying a thick manuscript of what he "hoped" were poems. He was slightly built, with a tanned, weathered face, shabbily dressed in tweeds. He couldn't be a student; perhaps he was a caretaker?

It took years of intense dialogue with this eminent professor of biochemistry to convince me that, yes, he was indeed a caretaker. A swimmer of Scotland's lochs and rivers, climber of its mountains, piper and forester, Geoffrey was, for 50 years, caretaker of nine acres of Perthshire rock, river, peat and pine where he created a wild garden.

When I left Dundee in 1975, I carried with me a manuscript of 31 Poems by GF Dutton, which I published under the Old Fire Station Poets imprint. Geoffrey followed this up with his first collection, Camp One, published in 1978. In 1983, he retired from university research – a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, with three honorary degrees.

Three volumes of poetry appeared subsequently from Bloodaxe Books: Squaring the Waves in 1986, The Concrete Garden in 1991, and, in 2002, The Bare Abundance, Selected Poems 1975–2001. A testament to his garden, Harvesting the Edge, was published in 1994, followed by Some Branch Against the Sky, a guide to marginal horticulture, in 1997. He is survived by Elizabeth and their children, Alasdair, Rory and Kirsty.

• Geoffrey John Fraser Dutton, poet and scientist, born 30 December 1924; died 1 June 2010

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Jul 2010 | 11:07 am

Teens Get High Off Digital Drugs

A new practice called "i-Dosing" involves listening to binaural beats, and is supposed to produce feelings of ecstasy.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Jul 2010 | 11:06 am

Bats Change Signals When Going for the Kill

Recordings of bats chasing prey through a field of microphones have explained why the insect-hunters change their calls when swooping in for the kill.

Lower echolocation frequencies provide a wider field of view, making it harder for prey to vanish from the bats’ sound-assisted sight.

“A lot of insects can hear ultrasound. If it’s really close to them, they do evasive maneuvers. Fold their wings up, go into power dives,” said biologist Lasse Jakobsen of the University of Southern Denmark. “We thought this could be a way for bats to counteract this.”

In the Daubenton’s Bat species tested by Jakobsen in a July 19 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, call frequency drops by a full octave as bats approach insects. That’s typical of the roughly 500 bat species who use echolocation to snatch insects on the wing, but scientists haven’t known why.

“People thought they couldn’t maintain the high frequencies, or that it had something to with bandwidth,” Jakobsen said.

Jakobsen and USD zoologist Annemarie Surlykke used an array of 12 suspended microphones to record captive bats’ echolocation calls while hunting. By comparing the intensity of calls at each microphone in relation to a bat’s location, they calculated the range covered at each frequency.

High frequencies used early in the hunt are like a flashlight, casting a relatively narrow beam. Lower frequencies are a light bulb, illuminating a wide circle. When bats get close, bugs have nowhere to hide.

Jakobsen next plans to study whether the shape of echolocation beams remain the same between species of different sizes and habits. “Beam shape plays a large role in how they perceive the world,” he said.

Image: Graphical representation of bat echolocation field during search (blue) and approach (red) phases of hunting./PNAS.

See Also:

• Bats Use Sun to Calibrate Geomagnetic Compass
• Bats Get Pitchy to Make 3-D Echolocation Map
• Infrared Video: 500000 Bats Emerge From Cave
• Video: Moth Blocks Bat Attack by Jamming Sonar
• Video: How Bats Land Upside Down

Citation: “Vespertilionid bats control the width of their biosonar sound beam dynamically during prey pursuit.” By Lasse Jakobsen, Annemarie Surlykke. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 29, July 20, 2010.

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 20 Jul 2010 | 10:59 am

Japan in a Cell Phone League of its Own

Japanese smartphones can act as keycards, personal I.D., transit passes, airline boarding tickets, credit cards and more.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Jul 2010 | 10:55 am

Walking Robot Breaks Distance Record

Cornell University’s Ranger robot has set a world record for untethered robotic walking.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Jul 2010 | 10:50 am

Test can predict success of IVF: U.S. report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. researchers have developed a formula that can predict whether fertility treatment will succeed more accurately than using age alone, and used it to develop a commercial test.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 20 Jul 2010 | 10:50 am

New Patch Poised to Replace Needles For Painless Flu Shot

A new vaccine patch provide a flu vaccine without a painful needle jab.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Jul 2010 | 10:47 am

Comic superhero Echo fights stereotypes of deaf people

Unlike most of the one-dimensional deaf characters in literature, Echo (aka Maya Lopez) has a complex emotional back story

Deaf characters are often marginalised in literature. Echo the deaf superhero is coming to the rescue as the creators of comics strive for realism in their portrayal of deaf characters.

"With any form of portrayal including the deaf in comics, we tend to see things very much from a hearing person's point of view," said Paul Dakin, a GP trainer from North London who studies deaf characters in literature, at a recent conference on comics and medicine. "Most of the people who write or who are artists are hearing, and as a result, traditionally there have been other reasons to portray deaf people. So, for example, they are plot devices; they are catalysts; they are means of reflecting particular aspects or features of a hearing character; they move the plot along, but they're not developed in their own right."

In Hergé's Tintin, for example, Professor Calculus is hard of hearing. His disability is used as a comic device to introduce trivial and amusing misunderstandings into the story, rather than explored in its own right. Similarly, Hope Hibbert, a deaf girl who first appeared in The Sensational Spider-Man, issue 18, uses her ability to read lips from security camera footage to give Spider-Man the information he needs to save the day.

"However, over the last 20 years an increasing number of deaf characters have started to emerge within mainstream comics," said Dakin. "That's given rise to the emergence of Echo. She is a major deaf character in the Marvel canon."

Echo (aka Maya Lopez) is a superhero like no other. First appearing in Daredevil issue 9 in 1999, she is a rare deaf character with a complex emotional back story. Born deaf to a Cheyenne father and a Hispanic mother, she has the power to perfectly imitate anything she sees, including a rival's fighting style.

"The character was going to debut as an antagonist in the story, but also as a love interest for Daredevil," Echo's creator and artist David Mack told me by email. "With Daredevil being blind, and constantly piecing his world together via his other senses, I felt he would be able to relate to Maya (aka Echo) who was deaf and grew up visually piecing the information of her world together to make sense of the mysterious audible world that she was not a part of."

As research for the character, Mack read autobiographies of people who grew up deaf. "That was an incredible insight to me," he said. "I read a book where a boy was told that the rain makes a noise, and that lightning has an audible counterpart in thunder. So then he wondered what sound the sunshine made ... This kind of first person perspective really let me think from a different point of view."

Echo uses both American Sign Language (ASL) and a Native American system developed for communication between tribes speaking different languages. The sign systems appear throughout the comic, both when Echo is signing and as background art.

Though Echo provides perhaps the most complete example of sign language in comics, it is not the first. On the front cover of DC's Supergirl, issue 65, characters sign the comic's title. Spider-Man himself uses ASL in Sensational Spider-Man, issue 31 (and every time he shoots webs he signs "I love you"; his hand position blending the signs for I, L and Y in ASL).

Some aspects of Echo's character are arguably not representative of the deaf community. "Often the assumption is made that most deaf people can read lips well, whereas in fact most of them can't," said Dakin.

"Lip-reading grew organically out of the character and the skills she developed based on her childhood," said Mack. "Maya grew up deciphering details from visual cues. She learned to make sense of body language, facial expressions, lip movements, piano playing, in such detail that she developed a pattern recognition in which she can decipher the pattern in just about anything visual."

She was a "walking Rosetta Stone", said Mack, able to decipher and repeat any movement as a physical language skill. "Aside from being able to physically absorb a system of complex movement such as dance or martial arts, she'd be a great code-breaker or glyph decipherer."

Tyron Woolfe, deputy director for children and youth at the National Deaf Children's Society, pointed out that no deaf character can represent the entire deaf community: "It is difficult to realistically encompass the whole spectrum of deafness in a story as it varies widely in terms of levels of deafness and communication methods."

But, he added, "For some deaf kids, having deafness as the central theme is inspiring."

On her influential blog Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature, Sharon Pajka-West of Gaudaullet University for the deaf in Washington DC, writes: "I don't think I need to go on and on about [Echo] ... because I always do and you know I love this character."

Mack said that when he wrote the characters Echo (who is deaf) and Daredevil (who is blind), he wanted to focus on what they could do rather than what society sees as their disability. "They are able to take that perceived deficit and turn it into a unique point of view that can become their asset."

"With the right support, deaf children can do anything any other child can do," said Woolfe. "Deaf children and young people can achieve at school, play musical instruments, write poetry or play football. We would like to see more of this creativity and determination in deaf characters, and more deaf characters portrayed in mainstream literature, with deafness not being the leading theme."

He said the National Deaf Children's Society would also like to see how deaf characters overcome their deafness, rather than have negative storylines in relation to deafness. "It is important that this overcoming is not taken to mean being cured, but is equated with managing one's deafness," he added.

Outside the deaf community, on the standard comic blog sites, Echo has had a very good reception, said Dakin. "Hearing readers are very supportive of Echo; they really like her."

Look out for Echo in Daredevil comics (volume 2, issues 51-55) and her own upcoming series, both published by Marvel Comics.

And you'll be seeing more of Echo in the near future. "I've been asked to write another Echo series and I'd love to," said Mack.

Cian O'Luanaigh is a graphic artist and science writer based in London. He has a masters in science communication from Imperial College London

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Jul 2010 | 10:17 am

Twitter Strangers

Over at Gizmodo, Joel Johnson makes a convincing argument for adding random strangers to your twitter feed:

I realized most of my Twitter friends are like me: white dorks. So I picked out my new friend and started to pay attention.

She’s a Christian, but isn’t afraid of sex. She seems to have some problems trusting men, but she’s not afraid of them, either. She’s very proud of her fiscal responsibility. She looks lovely in her faux modeling shots, although I am surprised how much her style aligns with what I consider mall fashion when she’s a grown woman in her twenties. Her home is Detroit and she’s finding the process of buying a new car totally frustrating. She spends an embarrassing amount of time tweeting responses to the Kardashian family.

One of the best things about Twitter is that, once you’ve populated it with friends genuine or aspirational, it feels like a slow-burn house party you can pop into whenever you like. Yet even though adding random people on Twitter is just a one-click action, most of us prune our follow list very judiciously to prevent tedious or random tweets to pollute our streams. Understandable! But don’t discount the joy of discovery that can come by weaving a stranger’s life into your own.

I’d argue that the benefits of these twitter strangers extend beyond the fleeting pleasures of electronic eavesdropping. Instead, being exposed to a constant stream of unexpected tweets – even when the tweets seem wrong, or nonsensical, or just plain silly – can actually expand our creative potential.

The explanation returns us to the banal predictability of the human imagination. In study after study, when people free-associate, they turn out to not be very free. For instance, if I ask you to free-associate on the word “blue,” chances are your first answer will be “sky”. Your next answer will probably be “ocean,” followed by “green” and, if you’re feeling creative, a noun like “jeans”. The reason for this is simple: Our associations are shaped by language, and language is full of cliches.

How do we escape these cliches? Charlan Nemeth, a psychologist at UC-Berkeley, has found a simple fix. Her experiment went like this: A lab assistant surreptitiously sat in on a group of subjects being shown a variety of color slides. The subjects were asked to identify each of the colors. Most of the slides were obvious, and the group quickly settled into a tedious routine. However, Nemeth instructed her lab assistant to occasionally shout out the wrong answer, so that a red slide would trigger a response of “yellow,” or a blue slide would lead to a reply of “green”. After a few minutes, the group was then asked to free-associate on these same colors. The results were impressive: Groups in the “dissent condition” – these were the people exposed to inaccurate descriptions – came up with much more original associations. Instead of saying that “blue” reminded them of “sky,” or that “green” made them think of “grass,” they were able to expand their loom of associations, so that “blue” might trigger thoughts of “Miles Davis” and “smurfs” and “pie”. The obvious answer had stopped being their only answer. More recently, Nemeth has found that a similar strategy can also lead to improved problem solving on a variety of creative tasks, such as free-associating on ways to improve traffic in the Bay Area.

The power of such “dissent” is really about the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer – this is the shock of hearing blue called “green” – we start to reconsider the meaning of the color. We try to understand this strange reply, which leads us to think about the problem from a new perspective. And so our comfortable associations – the easy association of blue and sky – gets left behind. Our imagination has been stretched by an encounter that we didn’t expect.

And this is why we should all follow strangers on Twitter. We naturally lead manicured lives, so that our favorite blogs and writers and friends all look and think and sound a lot like us. (While waiting in line for my cappuccino this weekend, I was ready to punch myself in the face, as I realized that everyone in line was wearing the exact same uniform: artfully frayed jeans, quirky printed t-shirts, flannel shirts, messy hair, etc. And we were all staring at the same gadget, and probably reading the same damn website. In other words, our pose of idiosyncratic uniqueness was a big charade. Self-loathing alert!) While this strategy might make life a bit more comfortable – strangers can say such strange things – it also means that our cliches of free-association get reinforced. We start thinking in ever more constricted ways.

And this is why following someone unexpected on Twitter can be a small step towards a more open mind. Because not everybody reacts to the same thing in the same way. Sometimes, it takes a confederate in an experiment to remind us of that. And sometimes, all it takes is a stranger on the internet, exposing us to a new way of thinking about God, Detroit and the Kardashians.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 20 Jul 2010 | 10:10 am

Beach Umbrellas Fail to Block 34 Percent of UV Rays

Shady umbrellas do not provide full protection from the sun, a new study suggests
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Jul 2010 | 10:03 am

Galapagos Tortoises Thriving as Plants Face Threat

Eliminating goats on the islands that once inspired Charles Darwin has helped boost native species.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Jul 2010 | 9:10 am

Why music is good for you

A survey of the cognitive benefits of music makes a valid case for its educational importance. But that's not the best reason to teach all children music, says Philip Ball.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 20 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Bad translation makes fundamentalists of us all | Marie Dhumières

Religious phrases are scattered liberally throughout Arabic languages. The secret to translating is not to take them literally

I was recently watching the Spanish documentary To Shoot an Elephant, about the Israeli attacks on Gaza in January 2009. The documentary is good, but the subtitles in English struck me as strange: "For the sake of Allah", "May Allah protect [your sons] for you", "May Allah reward you" and other references to God are recurrent throughout the film.

I couldn't help thinking that, when translated literally into English, these expressions make Arabs sound very religious – or even like fundamentalists – in the eyes of those who have a tendency to jump to quick conclusions. And no need to say there are many of these in the current context of Islamophobia as it has been shown before on Cif.

But that's just the way Arabic people speak. Fundamentalist Muslims, devout Muslims, moderate Muslims, part-time Muslims, Christians, Atheists – no one has an entire conversation without saying at the very least "Inshallah", which literally means "God willing" and comes from the idea that you never know what God's plan is. It can be used as much as you want, even if you're not really thinking about God's plans at that very moment.

I remember absurd conversations around the word when I first arrived in Syria 18 months ago:

"Ok, so I'll see you tomorrow Inshallah"
"Oh you're not sure, should I call back later?"
"No it's fine I'll see you at 6.30."
"Ok, see you tomorrow then."
"Inshallah."

No, no, it's not about God's will, I will see you tomorrow.

The same goes with "Praise be to God" (Alhamdulilah), which can mean "I am fine", "Cool, the electricity is back" or "Ah, you finally managed to pronounce this word", and so many other things.

When you come back from a trip people say "Praise God for your safety", and you should answer "May He keep you safe." But what it really means is "Welcome back" and "Thanks". At the end of a meal at someone's house, you should say "May God always provide you with food", and they would answer "May He give you health." But again, it means "Thanks, it was delicious" and "Really? Thank you, you're adorable."

If you have a shower or a haircut, if someone gives you something, if you're sick, if you say something stupid, if you're going to get married, if you've just had a baby, if you're mean to someone, if you get new shoes, if you get jealous of my amazing new shoes, if you want to swear that really, no, my new shoes are not so amazing – in almost every single daily life situation, there is a specific expression and a corresponding answer, which would refer to God in some way.

In Lebanon, they even use "May God dress you" when seeing a hot girl wearing a skirt or a top, meaning I guess, "Please God, quickly cover this great body before I jump on it."

The same goes with insults: May God destroy your house, May God burn your religion, May God infect you with disease… It all sounds very scary, but be reassured, they don't really mean it. And I am pretty sure that if God were actually to destroy your house at the moment they say it, they would feel kind of bad. And, even if people sometimes obviously really mean what they say when referring to God, most of the time they don't. When I leave my atheist communist friends' houses in Damascus and they say, beer in hand, "May God be with you," I laugh. But as one of them said to me "I don't think about it, and of course I don't mean it, it's a reflex, a tic."

I have been living in Syria for some time, and I have started using these phrases too. It truly becomes a reflex, and also limits the chances of being charged far too much for a taxi ride. But when I think about what I am actually saying, I smile to myself just imagining the face of a taxi driver in London if I were to say to him when entering the car, "May God give you strength." Hem, ok, well thank you.

In fact, removing religious references from daily speech in Arabic is a challenge. Another of my friends was telling me about how he had been trying for the last few years. "It's really hard," he said, "and that's why people often think I am a foreigner." It's not that foreigners refuse to use religious expressions by principle; it's just really hard to remember them all. So like my friend, they simply say "thanks" ("shukran"), "hello" ("marhaba"), and "good-bye" ("yalla bye" – no, it's not really an Arabic word).

But think about it. In English, we say "God damn it", "God bless you", "Jesus Christ", which would sound very strange if they were to be translated literally into another language. So next time you hear in the news or in a movie an Arabic guy saying "Praise be to God," remember he may just be saying "Great, the electricity is back."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Laser System to Monitor Space Junk

The tracking system could prevent space debris from colliding with spacecraft and satellites.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Jul 2010 | 8:50 am

Friday News Feedbag for Friday, July 16!

If this is your first exposure to the Friday News Feedbag... we're glad to have you in the club. Welcome to Feedbag Nation, which stems from our weekly science news podcast that you can subscribe to here on iTunes and ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Jul 2010 | 8:29 am

Depressed People Really Do See a Gray World

The eyes of depressed people may not be able to distinguish contrast.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Jul 2010 | 8:09 am

God in the classroom

All science teachers, whatever their specialism, have to deal with questions about God. We should be prepared

"Do you believe in God, sir?" I imagine that this is a question that science teachers, like me, get asked far more often than, say, English or Geography teachers. I usually answer with a simple "no, I don't", but I recently answered this question by saying "what do you think?" to which the student replied he thought I was probably an atheist because I was a "scientist". He was right about me being an atheist, but I was an atheist long before I was any kind of "scientist".

My student needn't have been right – not all scientists or science teachers are atheists. I've worked alongside religious science teachers and some of the greatest contributions to the science have been made by people who believed in a god. There are some people who would say that there is no conflict between science and religion but young people brought up in religious homes are not necessarily taught this and a few will even have been taught to believe the opposite. I know that some of my own students are struggling to reconcile what they see as contradictory approaches to understanding the world. I suspect it's particularly difficult for those who enjoy science, and are good at it, but come from particularly religious families.

I'm a physics teacher and you might think that I get away without too much of this sort of conflict in my lessons. You might think it's mostly the biology teachers, the ones who have to teach the theory of evolution, who have to deal with the awkward situation of teaching something that flatly contradicts the religious beliefs of some of their students. But it's not. And it shouldn't be. The truth is that all science teachers must deal with the fact that, if they are teaching science properly, their lessons will necessarily challenge the religious beliefs of some of their students.

Despite appearances to the contrary, science in schools is not just about teaching facts and figures, it is about teaching the way in which humans have arrived at answers to questions ranging from how life reproduces itself to how the stars shine. Science lessons should equip students with critical thinking skills, the most important of which is to ask for evidence for claims about "truth". If we've succeeded in teaching these skills, it's inevitable that some of our religious students will ask "what is the proof for the existence of a god?" and it's inevitable that some of these students will not be happy with the stock religious answers to this question.

I have been surprised at the number of students I meet who have been brought up to believe that the holy book of their particular religion contains the literal truth about the origins of life and the universe. As a physics teacher, it's my job to make sure that students appreciate that we have good reasons to believe that the universe is about 13.7bn years old and that it is filled with thousands of billions of stars. It is my job to teach that the earth was formed about 4.5bn years ago from the remnants of an exploded star and that we too are made up of atoms that came from that dead star. It is my job to teach that scientists think that everything, literally everything, came from a tiny point that exploded, creating time and space as it did so. More importantly I have to explain to them why we think this, and to admit to them that we don't yet fully understand how or why this happened. I try to make clear that science is not certain about these things, that it's about constantly trying to improve our understanding of the world and being open to the idea that we may be wrong.

If my colleagues and I do our jobs properly, our students should go away with a story about the history of life and the universe that is far richer, far grander and far more detailed than that presented in any religious text. More importantly, they should go away with an understanding of how and why this story has been written. If we do a really well, some of our students might even go away knowing that they can become co-authors of this story by becoming scientists themselves.

I'm not suggesting that science teachers should seek to convert children away from the religions they have been brought up with, or tell them that God doesn't exist. However, I can't help but feel that a proper science education should equip young people to arrive at their own decisions about what to believe, and ensure that if they do conclude there is a god, it is a god who doesn't stop them from fully appreciating the truth and beauty of scientific knowledge.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Jul 2010 | 5:30 am

Dinosaur 'find of the century'

Originally published in the Guardian on 20 July 1983

The 125-million-year-old skeleton of a flesh-eating dinosaur previously unknown to science has been unearthed after its gigantic clawbone, at least half as long again as the talon on the hind foot of the ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex, was found in a Surrey claypit. 

London's Natural History Museum, which announced the discovery, said it was probably the most important find in Britain in this century. 

The clawbone was found by Mr Bill Walker, an amateur fossil hunter who shattered it with a hammer as he tried to get it out of a rock, in January.

But it was not until the end of May, when the mud began to dry, that Dr Alan Charig and a team of experts from the museum in South Kensington were able to begin excavating the site. 

They took three vanloads of bones, some of them crushed and broken, back to the museum to be reassembled into a skeleton. 

The museum says guardedly that "a good proportion of the skeleton appears to be present, including parts of the skull with jaws and teeth serrated like steak knives." It also says that the beast of Surrey could have been up to 15 feet tall (standing on its hind legs) and would no doubt have fed on herbivorous dinosaurs in the same part of Surrey.

The site has not been disclosed, to protect it from souvenir hunters. 

"When I found the claw I really had no idea it was anything special," said Mr Walker, aged 55, a plumber who lives at Thornton Heath, Surrey. "To me it was just a very nice dinosaur claw – that was exciting enough." Mr Walker said he had picked up several pieces of bone from the pit when he saw a large rock, about the size of a rugby ball, with a small piece of bone sticking out. "I gave it a good crack with my hammer and the whole thing disintegrated," he said. "I really could have cried. It just shattered into about 15 or 20 pieces. I could see it was a claw of sorts, so I picked up the pieces and took them home."

He tried to glue the claw together but found several pieces missing. "I went back to the pit and found the same rock with the missing pieces still in it. This time I took the whole thing home."

He had no idea of its significance and the claw stayed on his mantelpiece as just another specimen for three or four weeks. Then his son-in-law suggested taking it to the museum. Southern England is unusually rich in fossil remains – the iguanadon was found at Lewes, the icthyosaur at Lyme Regis and the megalosaur at the Isle of Wight.

Tim Radford

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Jul 2010 | 4:34 am