OIl drilling off Libya to start within weeks: BP (AFP)

AFP - British oil giant BP will start drilling off the Libyan coast in a few weeks, a spokesman said Saturday, stressing it would take into account any lessons learned from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 4:13 am

Key rig alarm disabled before blast: rig worker (Reuters)

Reuters - An emergency alarm that could have warned workers aboard the doomed Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico drilling rig was intentionally disabled, a rig engineer told U.S. investigators on Friday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 4:05 am

Despite oil, baby turtles being released to Gulf (AP)

AP - Federal biologists are releasing thousands of endangered baby sea turtles into the western Gulf of Mexico, betting that by the time the silver dollar-sized swimmers make it to the oil-fouled waters of the eastern Gulf, BP will have cleaned up its goopy mess.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 3:41 am

Gulf of Mexico storm nears BP oil spill zone (AFP)

AFP - A storm system moved toward the Gulf of Mexico oil spill area Saturday, forcing response crews to head inland for safety and halting work to permanently plug the ruptured BP well.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 3:19 am

BP spill work on hold as Bonnie enters Gulf (Reuters)

Reuters - The approach of a major storm on Saturday forced BP Plc to halt efforts to permanently plug its gushing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and the system could regain strength after it weakened on Friday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 3:05 am

Space Station Robot Gets To Work

Two years after arriving at the International Space Station, the Canadian-built Dextre robot is ready to get to work.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 24 Jul 2010 | 2:58 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Tropical Storm Bonnie was forecast to keep pushing toward the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, while most of the Eastern U.S. remained extremely hot and muggy.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 2:52 am

Butterflies tracked in UK survey

Conservationists are calling on people to take part in the UK's largest ever butterfly count.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 24 Jul 2010 | 2:46 am

Storm threatens oil spill effort

Workers on ships at the site of the Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill make final preparations to leave as stormy weather nears.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 24 Jul 2010 | 2:07 am

Neil Armstrong's Travel Papers Allegedly Stolen By Customs Worker (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - A customs declaration form filled out by Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong was allegedly stolen by a U.S. customs worker and his friend, who together attempted to sell it at auction, federal prosecutors announced July 20 — the 41st anniversary of the moonwalker's historic first "small step" on the lunar surface
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 2:01 am

Don't like your findings? Spin them away

Even those carrying out formal academic research are guilty of twisting scientific facts to suit their purposes

There is a pleasing symmetry in the ropey science you get from different players. When GlaxoSmithKline are confronted with an unflattering meta-analysis summarising the results of all 56 trials on one of their treatments, as we saw last week, their defense is to point at seven positive trials, exactly as a homeopath would do. Politicians will often find a ray of positive sunshine in a failed policy's appraisal, and promote that to the sky. Newspapers, similarly, will spin science to fit their political agenda, with surreal consequences (the Telegraph claimed recently that shopping causes infertility in men, and the Daily Mail reckons housework prevents breast cancer in women). But does the same thing happen in formal academic research? Isabelle Boutron and colleagues set out to examine this problem systematically.

They took every trial published over one month that had a negative result – 72 in total – and then went through each trial report to look for evidence of "spin": people trying to present the results in a positive light, or distract the reader from the fact that the trial was negative.

First they looked in the abstracts. These are the brief summaries of the academic paper, and they are widely read, either because people are too busy to read the whole paper, or because they cannot get access to it without a paid subscription (a scandal in itself).

Normally, as you scan hurriedly through an abstract, you'd expect to be told the "effect size" – "0.85 times as many heart attacks in patients on our new super-duper heart drug" – along with an indication of the statistical significance of this result. But in this representative sample of 72 trials with negative results, only nine gave these figures properly in the abstract, and 28 gave no numerical results for the main outcome of the trial, at all. It gets worse. Only 16 of these negative trials reported the main negative outcome of the trial properly, anywhere, even in the main body of the text.

So what was in these trial reports? Spin. Sometimes the researchers found some other positive result in the spreadsheets and pretended that this was what they intended to count as a positive result all along. Sometimes they reported a dodgy subgroup analysis. Sometimes they claimed to have found that their treatment was "non-inferior" to the comparison treatment (when in reality a "non-inferiority" trial requires a bigger sample of people, because you might have missed a true difference simply by chance). Sometimes they just brazenly banged on about how great the treatment was, despite the evidence.

There a lots of things in place to stop this kind of stuff from happening. Trials are supposed to be registered, before they begin, with their protocol described in full, so that highly motivated individuals can go back and check if researchers changed their minds about what constituted a positive result, retrospectively, after the results came in. There are also reporting guidelines, such as Consort, which formalise the information that is supposed to appear in any scientific paper resulting from a trial.

But there is no enforcement for any of this, everyone is free to ignore it, and commonly enough – as with newspapers, politicians, and quacks – uncomfortable facts are cheerfully spun away.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 24 Jul 2010 | 1:00 am

First light for Solar Dynamics Observatory

'Treasure trove' of data reveals the anatomy and evolution of solar flares.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/hpSxT7N03O8" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 23 Jul 2010 | 10:08 pm

Seabird safety nixes Hawaii Friday night football (AP)

AP - High school football games on Hawaii's Kauai island will be held on Saturday afternoons instead of Friday nights this year to protect threatened seabirds.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 9:58 pm

Bonnie weakens to tropical depression over Gulf (AP)

AP - Bonnie has weakened to a tropical depression with winds near 35 mph (55 kph) after crossing Florida.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 9:24 pm

Ancient woman suggests diverse migration (AP)

AP - A scientific reconstruction of one of the oldest sets of human remains found in the Americas appears to support theories that the first people who came to the hemisphere migrated from a broader area than once thought, researchers say.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 9:18 pm

Butterflies tracked in UK survey

The public are asked to help track the UK's butterfly populations as conservationists warn many native species are in serious decline.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 23 Jul 2010 | 7:40 pm

Supercomputer reproduces a cyclone's birth, may boost forecasting

Scientists have employed NASA's Pleiades supercomputer and atmospheric data to simulate tropical cyclone Nargis -- with the first model to replicate the formation of the tropical cyclone five days in advance.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 6:00 pm

Out of the gait: Robot ranger sets untethered 'walking' record at 14.3 miles

The loneliness of the long-distance robot: A robot named Ranger walked 14.3 miles in about 11 hours, setting an unofficial world record. A human -- armed with nothing more than a standard remote control for toys -- steered the untethered robot.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 6:00 pm

Can I buy you a drink? Genetics may determine sensitivity to other people's drinking behavior

Your friend walks into a bar to meet you for happy hour. He sidles up to the bar and orders a drink -- does that make you more likely to get a drink yourself? According to new findings, genetics may determine the extent to which you are influenced by social drinking cues -- signals such as advertisements, drinks placed on a bar, and seeing other people around you drinking.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 6:00 pm

White eyes, foot-wide flowers, maroon plants: Researcher creating unique winter-hardy hibiscuses

With a little cross-breeding and some determination, plant physiologist and forage agronomist Dr. Dariusz Malinowski is trying to add more colors to the world of hibiscuses. Malinowski is working on breeding winter-hardy hibiscus in what started as a hobby about four years ago, but in the last year has been added to the strategic plan of the Vernon research program.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 6:00 pm

Cancer-metabolism link runs deep in humans, novel network algorithm suggests

Eighty years ago, the medical establishment believed cancer was caused by a dysfunction of metabolism, but the idea went out of vogue. Now, scientists are again looking at metabolism and its role in cancer and other common diseases.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 6:00 pm

Medicine from moss: Bioreactor technique may offer hope to people with age-related blindness

Biologists in Germany have used a moss bioreactor to produce a human protein, the absence of which leads to age-related blindness in 50 million people.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 6:00 pm

In Picture

The UK's endangered butterflies
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 23 Jul 2010 | 5:51 pm

Study Reveals How Cranberry Juice Conquers E. Coli

Anyone who’s had a urinary tract infection has probably heard of the centuries-old home remedy of swigging cranberry juice.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Jul 2010 | 5:49 pm

This column will change your life: A step in the right direction | Oliver Burkeman

A simple walk out in the fresh air often helps focus the mind and clear it of those everyday concerns. But why?

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking," observed Nietzsche, though I've always been a bit suspicious of the ardour with which writers and artists celebrate the inspirational power of taking a stroll: procrastination is a wily foe, and relishes convincing you that your preferred mode of time-wasting is critical to your success. Yet it seems to work. "Methinks the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow," was how Henry Thoreau described an experience many of us have had, be it tackling challenging work or fretting over problems. For what it's worth, I almost always plan this column in ambulatory fashion, muttering to myself in the park. I lay claim to no "great thoughts", but they'd be far worse without walking. And muttering. (Though I'd prefer not to dwell on that, thanks.)

If we still don't know why walking inspires clarity and creativity, it's because there are too many possible explanations, not too few. An evolutionary psychologist might say we're designed to thrive outside, not at a desk; a scholar of the psychological phenomenon of "priming" might point to studies suggesting that high ceilings – and also, perhaps, the sky – prompt unrestrained thinking. Dreamier types speak of the trance-inducing rhythm of pacing. A study in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology offers more straightforward reasoning. In it, both children and adults performed a memory exercise better when walking than sitting. The researchers speculate that the physiological arousal of walking simply makes for better brain functioning, while the normally detrimental effects of multitasking are eliminated when the tasks are sufficiently different, drawing on separate "wells" of attention, rather than fighting over one.

Maybe. Going solely on anecdotal experience, though, I suspect the greatest mental benefits of walking are explained not by what it is, but by what it isn't. When you go outside, you cease what you're doing, and stopping trying to achieve something is often key to achieving it. (See also: dating, insomnia.) Stepping away from work combats the paralysing effects of perfectionism, because when a task is suspended, the risk of failure is suspended, too; you're thus freer to dream up insights. And in some hard-to-specify way, even the distractions of walking – traffic noise, people – seem to help. The writer Ron Rosenbaum takes this to extremes, not just walking while thinking, but watching TV while writing. "I'm slightly ashamed to admit it, [since] it sounds like such a horrid violation of the writer's solitude," he once said. "But I have a theory of 'competing concentration'… if you have something that you have to focus against... it forces you to concentrate."

Naturally, the self-improvement industry has ideas to optimise your inspirational walking – the Idea Organiser app will capture your breakthroughs (so will a notebook). I'm more sceptical of the merits of a desk for home treadmills, while the aforementioned evolutionary psychologist would probably advise wearing Vibram "foot-gloves" for added authenticity. But all you really need do is go for a walk. "I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown," the naturalist John Muir wrote, "for going out, I found, was really going in." Deep. Though apparently he never had to worry about deadlines.

oliver.burkeman@guardian.co.uk,
twitter.com/oliverburkeman

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 23 Jul 2010 | 5:02 pm

Ring Around the Prey

These common bottled-nosed dolphins off the Florida coast are anything but common. The clever mammals have adapted to this local environment to come up with a unique method of catching fish in shallow water. Narrated by Oprah Winfrey.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Jul 2010 | 3:39 pm

Wily Fox

How do you catch mice hiding under several feet of snow? The Red Fox uses his acute hearing along with another little trick to catch his meal.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Jul 2010 | 3:38 pm

Lizards That Walk on Water

Basking in the sun leaves lizards vulnerable to being caught by predators. So the lizards have evolved an extraordinary escape mechanism. They drop into the water and then run across it, earning their nickname, the "Jesus Christ" lizard.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Jul 2010 | 3:37 pm

Hand Fed Eels

How do you keep your drinking water clean? By hand feeding the Eels that live in it. Eels feed on the decaying matter in pools of water and feeding them encourages them to stick around.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Jul 2010 | 3:36 pm

Coral Reefs

If just one coral settles in a suitable spot and survives, a new reef will be founded. The coral replicates itself and a colony develops, but it could take thousands of years for the reef to reach maturity.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Jul 2010 | 3:35 pm

Carnivorous Caterpillars

They're the larvae of a moth and look ordinary enough, but these tiny caterpillars are perhaps the strangest of their kind in the world. This is a carnivorous caterpillar, with a vice-like hold and a bite to match.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Jul 2010 | 3:34 pm

Bird Sanctuary

As the waters rise on the Okavango Delta tiny islands form. Safe from predators and surrounded by fish makes this the ideal spot for birds to raise their chicks.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Jul 2010 | 3:33 pm

Angling Bears

Bears love salmon but do not like to get their ears wet. The Adult bears teach their young a neat little fishing trick while keeping their head above water.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Jul 2010 | 3:32 pm

Simple screening test reduces invasive examinations for suspected bowel disease

A simple screening test identifies patients who are most likely to have inflammatory bowel disease and reduces the need for expensive, invasive and time consuming endoscopies, finds a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Nanoparticles as destructive beacons to zap tumors

A group of researchers is developing a way to treat cancer by using lasers to light up tiny nanoparticles and destroy tumors with the ensuing heat.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

How do cells die? Biophotonic tools reveal real-time dynamics in living color

Apoptosis, programmed cell death, is essential to normal development, healthy immune system function, and cancer prevention. The process dramatically transforms cellular structures but the limitations of conventional microscopy methods have kept much about this structural reorganization a mystery.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

New technique for studying dark energy

A new but technically challenging observational "shortcut" will help make large-scale cosmic maps that can yield clues to to the nature of the mysterious "dark energy" that pervades the universe.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Mysterious New Circle Found Near Stonehenge

New finding could be another henge. Or not.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Jul 2010 | 2:21 pm

Video: Exploding Moss Spores Form Mushroom Clouds

The air resistance to something as small as dust is so great that even if you threw it at mach speeds it would only go a couple inches. That is, unless you create a vortex ring — like a smoke ring or mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion.

Peat moss (Sphagnum moss), one of the most primitive living plants, does just that. By releasing its spores at up to 65 miles per hour in less than a thousandth of a second through a cylindrical opening, it can launch them up about half a foot high.

It might not sound like much, but getting spores to that height is critical for a plant that can grow less than half an inch tall. Half a foot is high enough to intersect normal air currents, which can carry the spores for miles and miles — theoretically indefinitely.

“Vortex rings allow the spores to be carried up very efficiently, because they have very little drag in the air and don’t mix with the air around it,” said physicist Dwight Whitaker of Pamona College, co-author of the study published July 22 in Science. ”The air coming out of the spore capsule is like the a core of a tornado, but if you took the top and the bottom of a tornado and glued them together. The tornado holds the spores in because of its very motion.”

Whitaker and his team captured high-resolution video of the moss tops exploding to study the vortex ring formation.

“Whitaker and Edwards have produced beautiful images and analyses of the involvement of turbulent  vortex rings in this amazing spore discharge process,” said biologist Karen Renzaglia of Southern Illinois University. “I think it is really cool.”

Biologists have known for over a hundred years about the exploding nature of peat moss reproduction. In 1897, biologist Sergius Nawaschin wrote: “Many times, when bending over a hammock [of peat moss] for closer examination, I felt the explosively discharged capsule lids strike my face.”

But this is the first time anyone has documented a plant creating a vortex ring, Whitaker said. In animals it is not that uncommon. Squid and jellyfish create vortex rings to propel themselves forward, and a healthy human heart creates a vortex ring between the left atrium and ventricle.

“This explains one of the wonders of the botanical world,” said biologist Joan Edwards of Williams College, an author on the paper. “It is amazing that such a simple plant came up with such a sophisticated system for propelling its spores.”

Peat moss is a critical plant for carbon storage on our planet. Peat bogs, formed of layers and layers of peat moss, cover one percent of Earth’s land surface, and account for 30 percent of the world’s soil carbon, Edwards said. Peat bogs are highly acidic and inhospitable to other life, so organic material like dead mosses, or dead bodies, doesn’t decompose.

As new habitat opens up in the Arctic with global warming, we should hope that peat moss disperses there, because it is such an effective carbon sponge, she said.

See Also:

• Bogosphere: The Strangest Things Pulled Out of Peat Bogs
• The Magic of Mushroom Spores
• Mushroom Cloud Marks Nuke Horror
• Santa Cruz Scientists Make Fluorescent Mushroom Chemical
• 7 Glow-in-the-Dark Mushroom Species Discovered
• Predicting the Next Deadly Manhole Explosion
• Pulsar’s Explosion May Show Rare Stellar Evolution

Citation: Dwight Whitaker and Joan Edwards. “Sphagnum Moss Disperses Spores with Vortex Rings.” Science, July 22.

Follow Jess McNally on Twitter @jessmcnally, and Wired Science @wiredscience.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 23 Jul 2010 | 2:05 pm

Help BP Learn How to Use Photoshop

Apparently BP can no longer afford to employ people with even remotely reasonable Photoshop skills. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the company has admitted to (poorly) altering photos of its clean up operations in the Gulf of Mexico that were released to the public.

BP claims these truly pathetic Photoshop jobs are the work of a contract photographer. It’s hard to know what to believe about this, but if there really is a photographer who took it upon himself to mess with these images, then this individual should be ashamed. We just can’t decide which is more shameful, the complete lack of ethics or the complete lack of Photoshop skill.

So let’s lend poor, embattled BP a hand and show them what people who actually know how to use Photoshop can do. Choose any of the three original photos from BP’s Flickr album of altered images, and have at it. Our favorite is the cockpit photo that was altered to look like the helicopter is in the air (above). But almost as charming is the first altered photo discovered of BP’s crisis command center (below). Gizmodo and Americablog do a great job of tearing down these photos and showing just how bad the Photoshopping is.

We’ll choose some of your best, most interesting, funniest and most skilled images you send us and post them early next week. Feel free to take as much creative liberty with the images as you like (as long as the end product isn’t obscene).

Submit your photos and vote for your favorites at the bottom of this post.

Original BP photos

Images: 1) Original (left) and altered (right) versions of a BP photo./© BP p.l.c. 2) Original (left) and altered (right) versions of a BP photo./© BP p.l.c.

OK, you know how this works. Submit your photoshopped pic and vote for your favorite.

Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated or submit your own photo

Submit a BP Photoshop job

While you can submit as many photoshopped pics as you like, you can only submit one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.

Back to top

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 23 Jul 2010 | 1:39 pm

LHC closes in on massive particle

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have seen several candidates for the heaviest sub-atomic particle known to science.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 23 Jul 2010 | 1:33 pm

Will An Asteroid Hit Earth?

If you live in fear of asteroids, then here's a sobering fact for you: Our planet absorbs asteroid impacts like a truck grille eats bugs. Plus, according to Donald K. Yeomans, most aren’t worth getting bent out of shape over. ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 Jul 2010 | 1:27 pm

Virtual Cells Cooperate Like Ants

The cooperative behavior of ants and slime molds is mimicked in a computer model and could lead to new ways of delivering drugs inside the body.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 Jul 2010 | 12:11 pm

Guerilla scientists infiltrate a Secret Garden Party

Synaesthesia, Petra Boynton's intimate places, communicating with the comatose and Marcus du Sautoy all feature at this weekend's Secret Garden Party, courtesy of Guerilla Science. Zoe Cormier will be there

It may have been the burlesque freak show temptress who set fire to her skin, the empathic robotic bust of Elvis sitting in the eyeworks laboratory in Blade Runner, or the three metre long tube that reveals the shape of sound with dancing fire – but regardless of the victor, there are many contenders for the title of the quirkiest performers Guerilla Science has featured this year.

This weekend at The Secret Garden Party might find us a new claimant to the title – perhaps Sampa Von Cyborg, who will perform live hangings and hookings in the name of science. Or maybe the giant brain that sings when you show it colours.

Guerilla Science started four years ago, sedately enough, with eight lectures in a grassy field at the Cambridgeshire music festival The Secret Garden Party, with scientists talking about such everyday topics as "Is God a number?" and "Could we live forever?" This year we have found ourselves in the most strange and unlikely settings for science, far more bizarre than an English music festival.

Astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell, accompanied by Guerilla Scientist Louis Buckley clad in a silver spacesuit, took us on an audio tour of the stars at the Stoke Newington International Airport arts festival Distance, where he spoke alongside a performance artist offering free "spoonings".

Then there was Secret Cinema's grandiose homage to Blade Runner. To help the audience think about what makes us human, computer scientists Laurel Riek from Cambridge University and Peter McOwan from Queen Mary, University of London, brought robots and surreal visual tests. Seeing them chat about neural networks inside the smoky eyeworks laboratory, while above us strippers danced on platforms, and outside costumed midgets smashed vintage cars with baseball bats, was truly memorable.

At the Lovebox in east London last weekend, burlesque artist Vivid Angel performed live piercings and burnings while hooked up to live biomonitoring equipment while she discussed pain with clinical psychologist Matteo Cella. (Her favourite kind of pain? "A broken heart.")

And the incredibly talented Vid Warren, who beatboxes while playing the flute, lent us his sonic skills as we amplified his sounds into our Reuben's tube – a three-metre-long metal tube that reveals the shapes of sound waves with a string of dancing flames, a performance we call Sonic Fire. Our physics maestro Steve Mould (the science presenter on Blue Peter) was on hand to explain the properties of sound. As he said, "Things become more beautiful when you understand how they work."

There are many groups doing fantastic science outreach events for the public around the world, but we're pretty sure nobody does it quite like us. We're especially passionate this year about creating interactive events, to break down the barrier between "expert" and "audience". As our head of marketing Mia Kukathasan puts it, "The lab is everywhere."

And so at the Secret Garden Party this weekend near Huntingdon in East Anglia, music psychologist Gianna Cassidy and singer songwriter Eoghan Colgan will discuss the science of musical expression, and festivalgoers will be able to help score a soundtrack for the festival using nifty interactive iPad technologies. Also on music, Cambridge neuroscientist Jessica Grahn will help us understand how babies are better at picking up rhythms than their parents and will lead the crowds with sonic social bonding routines.

Sex scientist Petra Boynton will discuss our intimate places with intimate questions and ask us where we like (and don't like) to be touched. Boynton and other scientists and philosophers will host small intimate discussions in a boat on the lake.

Perhaps most spectacularly, agency of adventure and play Coney has teamed up with scientists who study synaesthesia to produce a game exploring this condition, in which the senses are blended. Some people "hear" colours and "smell" numbers, for example. A giant brain, created by model-maker Roseanne Wakely, will be "fed" visual stimuli and in turn will sing tunes and instructions, leading participants through an elaborate and undoubtedly original game, like "a giant visual Kaos pad" says Bowdler.

There will still be lectures. The current Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy will tell us about the beauty of prime numbers and why David Beckham wears the number 23 shirt.

And neuroscientist Dr Adrian Owen will explain how we can speak to people in comas. He made history recently when, after a decade of careful work, he used brain scans to prove that some people in comas are actually conscious and can communicate if asked the right questions in the right way.

We cannot imagine any reason why science would not belong at a music festival, alongside cabaret strippers and crystal healers. The theme this year is "fact or fiction", and of course we fall into the former category. But we don't consider this to be a handicap. As our tagline goes: truth is stranger than fiction. Reality provides the mind with incredible fodder for the imagination. Some people just aren't willing – or lucky enough - to see it that way.

"Why does Guerilla Science exist? Simple: Science is part of our culture, yet often it's left languishing in the lab or conveyed in dull or patronising ways," says director Jenny Wong. "We are experimental people by nature, who like new trying new things. So 'mixing science, art, music and play' [our motto] reflects all of our interests. By bringing these together and collaborating with interesting people with new ideas, you can't help but think we'll produce something amazing. People who think in creative ways and succeed in capturing your imagination only make life more exciting."

By helping people to experience "science" in new ways, in unexpected places and with the quirkiest of collaborators, we hope to inspire them to reflect on the complexity of their lives and how remarkable it is to exist at all.

Zoe Cormier is one of the directors of Guerilla Science

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 23 Jul 2010 | 11:58 am

Meteor Crater Discovered With Google Earth

Researchers poring over Google Earth images have discovered one of Earth’s freshest impact craters — a 45-meter-wide pock in southwestern Egypt that probably was excavated by a fast-moving iron meteorite no more than a few thousand years ago.

Although the crater was first noticed in autumn 2008, researchers have since spotted the blemish on satellite images taken as far back as 1972, says Luigi Folco, a cosmochemist at the University of Siena in Italy. He and his colleagues report their find online July 22 in Science.

The rim of the Egyptian crater stands about 3 meters above the surrounding plain, which is partially covered with distinct swaths of light-colored material blasted from the crater by the impact. These rays, which emanate from the impact site like spokes from the hub of a wheel, are what drew researchers’ attention to the crater, says Folco. While such “rayed craters” are common on the moon and other airless bodies of the solar system, they are exceedingly rare on Earth because erosion and other geological processes quickly erase such evidence.

During expeditions to the site early in 2009 and again this year, scientists found more than 5,000 iron meteorites that together weigh more than 1.7 tons. The team estimates that the original lump of iron weighed between 5 and 10 metric tons when it slammed into the ground at a speed of around 3.5 kilometers per second, with most of the material vaporizing during the collision.

Analyses of soil samples from the site and of sand fused into glass by the impact’s intense heat and pressure may help the team estimate when the event occurred. Preliminary analyses suggest that it happened sometime during the last 10,000 years, probably no more than 5,000 years ago, Folco says.

Image: National Museum of the Antarctic, University of Siena

See Also:

• Did a Meteorite, or Nerdy Hoaxsters, Strike Latvia?
• Meteor Predicted to Hit Earth's Atmosphere Tonight
• First-Ever Asteroid Tracked From Space to Earth
• NASA Falling Short of Asteroid Detection Goals
• First-Ever Asteroid Tracked From Space to Earth
• Asteroid Impact Craters on Earth as Seen From Space
• Haiti Relief's Secret Weapon: Google Earth

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 23 Jul 2010 | 11:57 am

Iran aims to put man in space by 2019: Ahmadinejad

TEHRAN (Reuters) - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Friday that Iran would send its first manned shuttle into space by 2019, Iran's English-language Press TV reported.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 11:49 am

Rough trade

Skull haul highlights the global illegal trade in endangered species
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 23 Jul 2010 | 11:41 am

Fossil Jaw Could Be From World’s Oldest Known Dog

Every dog has its day, but that day took more than 14,000 years to dawn for one canine. A jaw fragment found in a Swiss cave comes from the earliest known dog, according to scientists who analyzed and radiocarbon-dated the fossil.

Dog origins remain poorly understood, however, and some researchers say that dog fossils much older than the Swiss find have already been excavated.

An upper-right jaw unearthed in 1873 in Kesslerloch Cave, located near Switzerland’s northern border with Germany, shows that domestic dogs lived there between 14,100 and 14,600 years ago, say archaeology graduate student Hannes Napierala and archaeozoologist Hans-Peter Uerpmann, study coauthors at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

“The Kesslerloch find clearly supports the idea that the dog was an established domestic animal at that time in central Europe,” Napierala says.

Researchers have also found roughly 14,000-year-old dog fossils among the remains of prehistoric people buried at Germany’s Bonn-Oberkassel site.

Older fossil skulls recently identified by other teams as dogs were probably Ice Age wolves, Napierala and Uerpmann argue in a paper published online July 19 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. That includes a 31,700-year-old specimen discovered more than a century ago in Belgium’s Goyet Cave and reported in 2009 to be the oldest known dog.

Paleontologist Mietje Germonpré of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, who directed the analysis of the Goyet fossil, stands by his conclusions. “The Kesslerloch dog is not the oldest evidence of dog domestication,” he says.

Numerous wolf fossils lie near alleged dog remains at Kesslerloch Cave and Goyet Cave, raising doubts about whether either site hosted completely domesticated animals, remarks archaeologist Susan Crockford of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. She regards the Swiss jaw as an “incipient dog” in the early stages of domestication from wolves.

Scientists disagree about how and when dogs originated, other than that wolves provided the wild stock from which dogs were bred. One investigation of genetic diversity in modern dogs and wolves concluded that domestication occurred in southeastern Asia, whereas another placed canine origins in Eastern Europe or the Middle East (SN: 4/10/10, p. 12).

Napierala and Uerpmann suspect that, however the DNA studies pan out, they will show where wolves originated, not dogs. In their view, dogs were domesticated from local wolf populations in various parts of Europe, Asia and perhaps northern Africa sometime before 15,000 years ago.

The Kesslerloch dog jaw and its remaining teeth are considerably smaller than those of wolves recovered from the same site, the scientists say. A space between two of the fossil dog’s teeth indicates that domestication must have reached an advanced phase at that time, they argue. During initial stages of domestication, jaws shrink in size faster than teeth, producing dental crowding. Later in the domestication process, teeth get small enough to leave spaces.

Canine fossils from Goyet and several other sites older than Kesslerloch Cave fall within the size ranges of modern and ancient wolves, Napierala adds. Relatively short, robust snouts on the older fossils, initially cited as evidence of domestication, may denote an adaptation of wolves to hunting large Ice Age game, he holds.

Ancient dogs had shorter, broader snouts, wider mouths and wider brain cases than wolves, responds Germonpré. Brain studies indicate that dogs’ retinas became reorganized to focus on the central visual field, perhaps to assist in tracking human faces, at the same time that selective breeding produced shorter noses, he says.

Dogs older than the one at Kesslerloch Cave were relatively large, although not as large as wolves, Germonpré argues. Those dogs have been unearthed at sites that have yielded huge numbers of mammoth bones. People living in those areas may have used dogs to haul mammoth meat from kill areas and as sentinels, he proposes.

Napierala and Germonpré agree that a resolution of this debate demands the dogged pursuit of additional canine fossils.

Image: H. Napierala

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 23 Jul 2010 | 11:30 am

Meteorite Impact Crater Found with Google Earth

The massive pock in southwestern Egypt was created no more than a few thousand years ago.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 Jul 2010 | 11:00 am

Consumer gene test results misleading

CHICAGO (Reuters) - People who send off their saliva to genetic testing companies to find out their risk for prostate cancer or diabetes are likely to get different results, depending on the company they choose, government investigators told lawmakers on Thursday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 23 Jul 2010 | 10:34 am

Top of the flops - bellyflop shows how frogs evolved

Frogs evolved the ability to jump before they perfected the art of landing, according to scientists.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 23 Jul 2010 | 10:16 am

Satellite spies vast algal bloom in Baltic Sea

A satellite image reveals the scale of a vast algal bloom, described as the size of Germany, spreading across the Baltic Sea.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 23 Jul 2010 | 10:01 am

World's Oldest Dog Debated

A dog jaw bone fossil found in a Swiss cave may be the oldest evidence of human-canine companionship.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 Jul 2010 | 9:49 am

BP Trying to Silence Science on Oil Spill?

Scientists and academics accuse the energy giant of trying to buy silence to protect itself after the spill.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 Jul 2010 | 9:45 am

'Eternal plane' returns to Earth

The record-breaking Zephyr unmanned solar-powered plane touches down in Arizona after two weeks of non-stop flight.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 23 Jul 2010 | 8:48 am

Trafigura found guilty on waste

A Dutch court finds multinational firm Trafigura guilty of illegally exporting toxic waste from the Dutch port of Amsterdam to Ivory Coast.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 23 Jul 2010 | 8:19 am

Oil Spill Work on Hold as Bonnie Approaches

Tropical Storm Bonnie was expected to reach the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, delaying efforts to fix the well.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 Jul 2010 | 8:18 am

Deepest Hydrothermal Vent Offers Alien Life Model

Three distinct types of hydrothermal vents, including the deepest vent yet observed, were discovered along a 100 kilometer long strip in the Caribbean Sea.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 Jul 2010 | 7:14 am

Secrets of Stonehenge | Nicholas Taylor

The mysteries of Stonehenge remain as deep as they ever were after the discovery of a 'twin' site on Salisbury Plain

Though there was much in the recent series of Doctor Who that niggled me, the sight of our heroes galloping towards Stonehenge couldn't fail to squeeze out a gasp of delight. While I know nature is remarkable without exception, certainly not only cordoned off by a gorsedd of standing stones, there's something dizzying about the presence of stone marshals in formation.

Summer news from Salisbury Plain suggests Stonehenge is no longer the only megalithic player in town. Pricking the arrogance of singularity, archeologists have found confirmation of a woodhenge buried beneath ground level within chanting distance of the stone circle. Professor Vince Gaffney calls the finding "remarkable", suggesting it will "completely change the way we think about the landscape around Stonehenge".

Is that so? Presumably this is the same landscape that was so dramatically unaltered in October 2009 when another bluestone circle was discovered a mile away to the left. The same landscape that counts chalk horses, wood henges, barrows, tumps and stone avenues among its closest neighbours.

And while it is almost beyond excitement to witness archeologists using clever machines, allowing them to see the subterranean landscape and map it digitally, the sun's unhurried arc across the sky seems to make more progress than the body of scientists exploring what these sites were for and how they were assembled.

Those old stones sing to us still, that much is evident from the thousands of visitors who daily pay their fare to shuffle round them. Such is their popularity that the many have to be herded round them widdershins (anti-clockwise, hence decreasing the power of the stones) and reminded at regular intervals not to touch them. But what is it about them that keeps drawing us back, distracted from asking what we want to know by the multi-lingual audio-guides babbling away in our ears?

I am lucky enough to live way out west, about as far as you can get before reaching the Irish Sea. The landscape of Pembrokeshire has more than a tangential link with that of Stonehenge. The bluestones, which form such an integral though subtle part of the stone circle, have their origins in the wild rock-crested ridges of the Preseli mountains. The link between West Wales and mysticism is as intact as the one between Wimbledon and strawberries. Out on the fringes of the land you don't have to walk far before passing a lonely dolmen or recumbent burial chamber. Indeed, much like armoured police vans in central London, sacred sites out west seem to be becoming more frequent by the day.

So confident was the modern world in claiming to have the number of our stone-moving ancestors, Coca-Cola mounted a challenge in 1999 to show how easy it would be to move a bluestone from Pembrokeshire to Wiltshire, using only the technology assumed to be available 4000 years ago. They jolted the stone downhill to Milford Haven using tree trunks as rollers and once at the estuary, attached it to a simple boat, with the intention of sailing it across the Bristol Channel. No sooner was it off shore than it sank, taking the Coca-Cola challenge with it. But the legacy of this millennial endeavour was to suggest that whatever energy helped form Stonehenge it was more than brute force and grunting.

There are many different ways of gaining information from the natural world and the established scientific method presents one of them. The more intuitive and spiritual methods of consulting with the spirits of place, element, plant and animal might seem hilarious to those who would consider Glade Air Wick the acme of rational achievement, but they have as much a place in our relationship with the world. More, sometimes, in that they offer the individual conducting the questions a sense of humility instead of hubris, and don't see the need to kill or smash the object of enquiry. Or drop it into Milford Haven.

Stonehenge attracts some because it's a riddle. For others, it is the most obvious situation in the world. A circle is a place to gather, to dance and drum or sit in silence and meditate. It's a place to heal and whisper and tell the time. For those who want to know how the stones got there and what they may mean, I'd advise putting down the audio guides and asking them; providing that the impossible is permitted to be an answer.

There is a field not far from me where a stone has just risen, as if being born from the earth. Where there was recently nothing but tussocks of grass and clusters of Poppets-shaped sheep poo, there now stands a megalith. As compelling, even reassuring, as the rational method is, it is never the whole story. I can't help thinking the originators of sites like Stonehenge, however they constructed it, had a better understanding of this than us. For all our machines.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 23 Jul 2010 | 6:29 am

Is there anywhere left for the Higgs boson to hide?

Tantalising evidence was presented yesterday at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Paris supporting some of physicists' most cherished theories. But where was the Higgs?

Ok, I registered, and now have yet another geeky backpack, a pen, and a map of Paris. Plus a dog tag with my name and "ICHEP 2010" on so that security won't throw me out. Excellent. Off to a day of parallel talk sessions.

In one room the audience were hearing how well the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) detectors at Cern are working, which is very well indeed. This is a major achievement not to be underestimated. They have come into operation much more smoothly than is usual for highly complex particle detectors.

I basically knew that already, so I went to another very crowded session where the latest Hera (a particle accelerator at DESY in Hamburg) and Tevatron measurements of the W and Z bosons were being shown, along with the very first measurements of these particles from the Atlas and CMS detectors at the LHC.

The W and Z are the particles that carry the weak force, and they have been well measured in previous experiments. But when I saw their mass peaks in 7 teraelectronvolt collisions for the first time, it brought home to me in a surprisingly powerful way the anchor that experiment provides for our understanding.

The W and Z lead very fleeting lives, decaying almost immediately into other particles. They are bosons generated by the symmetries of the Standard Model of physics, and according to our model their masses come directly from the Higgs. In a sense they are partly made up of the Higgs. It's all a bit abstract, but quantum mechanical exchanges of these particles are responsible for making the sun shine.

There's also a definite prediction, for example, that when you plot the distribution of electron-positron pairs in our collisions, you should see a big bump. And there it is. It works. Don't let anyone tell you quantum mechanics is only about uncertainty.

Floating significantly more freely from the anchors of experiment in the hardcore theory session was Erik Verlinde of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Amsterdam, discussing the idea that gravity and general relativity may not be fundamental, but instead may emerge from the bulk behaviour of smaller things. If I understand it right, this would make gravitational waves essentially no more fundamental than sound waves.

Fascinating, possibly a new direction, but as the speaker himself said, the theory needs to make some experimentally testable predictions.

In the final session of the day we had presentations on the Higgs searches at the Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab in the US. Surprise, surprise – the room was packed (see photo above). I wonder why the organisers didn't use one of the bigger rooms. They can't have been taken unawares by the level of interest, surely?

Anyhow, what we saw were the component parts of a number of different searches for that damned elusive particle, carried out independently at the CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab) and DZero experiments.

What is obvious is that no one is going to announce a clearcut observation of the standard model Higgs at this conference. What is not clear yet is how close we are, how much room the Higgs has left to hide in, and whether there are any hints of its presence. These questions will be answered at the plenary session on Monday, apparently, when the combined results of both colliders and all their different techniques will be shown.

What comes now is a champagne reception while we look at lots of cool physics posters. It'll have to do ...

Jon Butterworth is a member of the High Energy Physics Group at University College London

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 23 Jul 2010 | 5:56 am

Dinos Dug Around for Prey

Fossilized mammal burrows reveal that some dinosaurs dug into these dens in search of furry morsels.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 Jul 2010 | 5:00 am

Subaru Outback's Wi-Fi Connection Not So Hot

Slow speeds and high cost make this new feature a big disappointment.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 Jul 2010 | 4:22 am

Video: Elephant attacks trainer at an Ohio Zoo

Don Redfox was seriously injured when he entered a room in the Toledo zoo elephant exhibit that housed seven-year-old male, Louie

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 23 Jul 2010 | 3:52 am

BP denies 'buying silence' of oil spill scientists

Oil giant says it is just keeping company data confidential, as it faces 200 federal civil lawsuits over spill

BP has rejected accusations of muzzling the scientists and academics it has hired to help fight hundreds of lawsuits relating to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The American Association of University Professors claims the oil giant is seeking to "buy the silence" of the scientific community in its fight against litigation.

But BP says it is only protecting confidential information and is not trying to prevent the discussion of scientific data.

A copy of the contract issued by BP to scientists, obtained by the BBC, says they cannot publish the research they conduct for BP or speak about the data for at least three years, or until the government gives the final approval to the company's restoration plan for the gulf.

It also states that scientists may perform research for other agencies only so long as it does not conflict with the work they are doing for BP, and that they must take instructions from lawyers offering the contracts and other in-house counsel at the oil company.

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, criticised the contract. He told the BBC: "This is really one huge corporation trying to buy faculty silence in a comprehensive way."

Bob Shipp, head of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama and one of the scientists approached by BP's lawyers, said the company wanted to hire his whole department.

"They contacted me and said we would like to have your department interact to develop the best restoration plan possible after this oil spill," he said. "We laid the ground rules – that any research we did, we would have to take total control of the data, transparency and the freedom to make those data available to other scientists and subject to peer review. They left and we never heard back from them."

BP said that it had hired a number of experts to help with the lawsuits, as well as a number of national and local scientists with expertise in the resources of the gulf of Mexico to help in restoration work.

"These scientists are helping us collect and understand data about the impacts of the oil spill on the natural resources and to plan for restoration of those resources," BP said.

"As is customary, we have asked these experts (more than a dozen) to treat information from BP counsel as confidential. However, BP does not take the position that environmental data are confidential.

"Moreover, BP does not place restrictions on academics speaking about scientific data."

Seven federal judges next week will meet attorneys in Boise, Idaho, to try and decide whether or how to consolidate more than 200 federal civil lawsuits filed by a range of claimants, from fishermen to injured rig workers, oil-rig owner Transocean and other contractors tied to the spill.

The judges will consider two key questions: where the cases will be heard and who will preside over them.

The lawsuits range from civil racketeering and personal-injury suits to claims from out-of-work shrimpers and owners of now-vacant hotels on the gulf shore.

The cost of the spill to BP has already exceeded $3.1bn (£2bn), and the company has pledged some of its assets as security to the US government while it builds up a promised $20bn compensation fund. Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate the final bill for the disaster caused by the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed 11 workers, could run to $70bn.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 23 Jul 2010 | 3:27 am