Transplant drug preserves kidneys, avoids toxicity, studies suggest

The experimental drug belatacept can prevent graft rejection in kidney transplant recipients while better preserving kidney function when compared with standard immunosuppressive drugs, data from two international phase III clinical trials show.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Life is shorter for men, but sexually active life expectancy is longer

At age 55, men can expect another 15 years of sexual activity, but women that age should expect less than 11 years, according to a new study. Men in good or excellent health at 55 can add 5 to 7 years to that number. Equally healthy women gain slightly less, 3 to 6 years.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Big power from tiny wires: Carbon nanotubes can produce powerful waves that could be harnessed for new energy systems

Scientists have discovered a previously unknown phenomenon that can cause powerful waves of energy to shoot through minuscule wires known as carbon nanotubes. The discovery could lead to a new way of producing electricity, the researchers say.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Cotton is the fabric of your lights, your MP3 player, your cell phone

Consider this T-shirt: It can monitor your heart rate and breathing, analyze your sweat and even cool you off on a hot summer's day. Or a solar-powered dress that can charge your MP3 player? This is not science fiction -- this is cotton in 2010.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Ever-changing Earth: How the atmosphere can affect planet's shape, rotation, gravitational field

Researchers in Austria are investigating the effects of the Earth's atmosphere on our planet's shape, its rotation and its gravitational field. The researchers' aim is to develop a better understanding of the Earth's system and to support the development of the Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS).
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Low oxygen levels in body linked to cancer-aiding protein

A professor of biochemistry who was researching protein kinase C gamma in the lens of the human eye found her work taking a fascinating turn when she discovered a correlation between the protein Coonexin46 and hypoxia -- a deficiency of oxygen which kills normal tissue cells. The researcher believes the findings will lead to serious advancements in treating retinoblastoma, a cancer that forms in the tissue of the retina.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Big Generation Gaps in Work Attitudes Revealed

Young workers called GenMe are more likely than their elders to value leisure over work and to place a premium on rewards such as higher salaries and status.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Mar 2010 | 8:20 am

Big Generation Gaps in Work Attitudes Revealed (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Experiences help to shape life, so it's reasonable to think someone who grew up when John F. Kennedy was shot might have a different worldview than a person who witnessed Enron collapse and has been "wired" since just a tot.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 7:35 am

Effort to Map Human Brain Faces Complex Challenges

Neuroscientists hope to harness computing power to help map millions of miles of "wiring" that connects brain cells.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Mar 2010 | 7:12 am

Police probe Toyota Prius crash in NYC suburb (AP)

AP - The driver of a Toyota Prius told police in suburban New York that her car accelerated on its own, then lurched down a driveway, across a road and into a stone wall.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 6:52 am

Effort to Map Human Brain Faces Complex Challenges (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Mapping the connections among brain cells could someday prove as revolutionary as mapping the human genome. But tracing each synaptic connection between neurons - essentially a manual effort so far - has proven painstakingly slow. To approach a thorough mapping, researchers will have to develop a computer-automated process.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 6:27 am

Scientists discover 'catastrophic event' behind the halt of star birth in early galaxy formation

Scientists have found evidence of a catastrophic event they believe was responsible for halting the birth of stars in a galaxy in the early universe. The researchers observed the massive galaxy as it would have appeared just three billion years after the Big Bang when the Universe was a quarter of its present age.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

New study questions benefits of elective removal of ovaries during hysterectomy

Removal of the ovaries (bilateral oophorectomy) while performing a hysterectomy is common practice to prevent the subsequent development of ovarian cancer. This prophylactic procedure is performed in 55% of all U.S. women having a hysterectomy, or approximately 300,000 times each year. A new article suggests that this procedure may do more harm than good.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

Hemoglobin A1c outperforms fasting glucose for risk prediction

Measurements of hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) more accurately identify persons at risk for clinical outcomes than the commonly used measurement of fasting glucose, according to a new study. HbA1c levels accurately predict future diabetes, and they better predict stroke, heart disease and all-cause mortality as well.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

Chemical competition: Research identifies new mechanism regulating embryonic development

A research team has discovered that protein competition over an important enzyme provides a mechanism to integrate different signals that direct early embryonic development. The work suggests that these signals are combined long before they interact with the organism's DNA, as was previously believed, and also may inform new therapeutic strategies to fight cancer.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

Science 'is a key election issue'

The science spokesmen of the three main political parties cross swords on the issue of UK research funding.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Mar 2010 | 5:58 am

Gourmet diners 'may spell extinction' for sea turtle (AFP)

AFP - Malaysians' voracious appetite for turtle eggs could drive the marine creatures to extinction on its shores, conservationists warned on Wednesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 5:21 am

An Olympic honour for Alan Turing

The 2012 Olympics offer the perfect chance to mark the anniversary of a great mathematician – and marathon runner

Last year I led a campaign to obtain an apology for the mistreatment of the British mathematician Alan Turing. Turing's prosecution for homosexuality led to the death of a true genius at the age of only 41 in 1954. On 10 September last year, Gordon Brown issued an apology that recognised Turing's stature as one of the greatest Britons. But Britain has a final opportunity to unapologetically recognise Alan Turing in two years' time, at the 2012 Olympics.

It's now well known that Turing laid down the foundations of computer science in the 1930s, helped shorten the second world war by breaking Nazi codes at Bletchley Park and investigated artificial intelligence. He went on to design early computers during the late 1940s and just before he died he was untangling the process of morphogenesis to understand why and how living beings take the shape they do. Only today are scientists appreciating the work he did in his last years, and every computer user can be thankful for his theoretical Turing machine, which captured the essence of the machines we all use.

What is less known is that Turing was also an accomplished physical athlete. He was an excellent marathon runner, with a best time of 2 hours 46 minutes. He ran for a local club in Walton, Surrey while working at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. He is also said to have run between London and Bletchley Park for meetings during the second world war, and at age 14 he cycled 60 miles from Southampton to school at Sherborne during the general strike of 1926.

The last time Britain hosted the Olympics, in 1948, Turing tried out for the British Olympic marathon team. He came fifth in the trials. He ended up attending the games as a spectator taking along two of his young nieces as guests. That year Britain took a silver in the marathon when Thomas Richards ran for 2 hours 35 minutes. Alan Turing was only 11 minutes slower.

2012 has great significance: it's the centenary of his birth on 23 June. To celebrate "Alan Turing Year", mathematicians and scientists across Britain and around the world are arranging events throughout the year. Celebrations of Turing's work will be held in Manchester (where he was living and working when he died) and at Bletchley Park. There's even a suggestion that Unesco should designate 2012 the year of computer science.

Turing's life also deserves celebration far from the places he's most associated with. As Britons, we live in a world Turing helped create: computers have permeated our lives and his work at Bletchley Park with thousands of others helped bring the war with Nazi Germany to an end. As London shows off what's great about Britain through the Olympic games, let's show off a great Briton of whom we should be proud. What better way to honour Turing than by naming the 2012 marathon the "Turing marathon" and inviting his surviving nieces to witness the event? One of them could even be invited to fire the starting pistol that will set the runners off. Those little girls are elderly now, but their memories of Uncle Alan are bright. Inviting them would be a fitting tribute.

Of course, detractors may be concerned about sullying the games by associating an individual with an event. But such concerns didn't stop Greece in 2004 from naming their entire Olympic stadium after Spiridon Louis (who won the marathon event in 1896). Honouring the life of a man would be a welcome antidote to the heavy commercialisation surrounding the games.

Others may worry about raking over the embers of the dark days of anti-homosexuality laws. But there's little need to be concerned: celebrating Turing doesn't mean focusing on just that one aspect of his life; it means recognising a mental and physical athlete, a mathematician and marathon runner, and a man to whom we owe so much. It's rare that events coincide to give us one moment in time when a man like Turing can be celebrated in all his complexity. Let's not miss the chance in 2012.

• This article was commissioned after the author contacted us via a You Tell Us thread

• Alan Turing
• Olympic games 2012
• London
• Athletics
• Second world war

John Graham-Cumming

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 10 Mar 2010 | 5:00 am

Supermarket Lights Supercharge Vegetables' Nutrition Value

Grocery stores and consumers may want to rethink how they store their produce.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Mar 2010 | 5:00 am

Czech repair of famed Charles Bridge faces protest (AP)

AP - Built like a mighty fortress, Charles Bridge has survived floods and fires over the past 650 years. But conservationists are warning that the storied span linking Prague's two oldest neighborhoods might succumb to a different threat — renovation.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 4:57 am

Jon Venables posed 'trivial' risk to public, according to psychiatric study

Evaluation of Venables before his release in 2001 concluded the likelihood of the killer re-offending was minor

A psychiatric evaluation of Jon Venables carried out before his release from prison concluded that he posed a "trivial" risk to the public and that the likelihood of him re-offending was "so negligible as to not amount to a serious consideration".

The document, which was prepared by a leading psychiatrist in 2000 and is excerpted in today's Times, also noted that Venables had made "exceptional psychological progress" and come to terms with his part in the murder of James Bulger in 1993.

"The Jon Venables of today is a very different person to the Jon Venables aged 10," the report noted. "It has been a very important part of his rehabilitation so far that he has come to terms in a wholly realistic way with the awfulness of his behaviour."

It emerged last week that Venables, who was given a new identity and released on licence in 2001, has been recalled to prison following "extremely serious allegations".

Media reports over the weekend suggested that Venables, now 27, had been returned to prison in connection with child pornography offences. It has also been suggested in the press that Venables has become mentally fragile, has been known to drink heavily and use drugs, and has revealed his true identity to others.

Although the psychiatric report estimated that the chances of Venables being rehabilitated were "exceptionally high", it stressed that his progress depended on him being able to maintain his anonymity and continuing to receive the "appropriate support and guidance".

It also recommended that he be released from juvenile custody rather than placed in the prison system, where exposure to drug taking and criminals would prove a "very major setback".

The justice secretary, Jack Straw, has refused to bow to pressure to disclose the reasons for Venables's recall to prison, and has been supported by the judge who granted the former prisoner anonymity.

Lady Butler-Sloss, the former president of the high court's family division, reiterated "the enormous importance of protecting his anonymity now and if he is released, because those who wanted to kill him in 2001 are likely to be out there now".

She said: "This young man may or may not be tried. He may or may not have committed offences. There is, of course, at least the possibility that he has committed no offence.

"And consequently, he may therefore be allowed again to be out (of jail) on licence."

James Bulger's mother, Denise Fergus, has accused the government of treating the issue like a political football and of closing doors in her face.

She told ITV's This Morning that the days following the revelation of Venables' recall had been "a massive rollercoaster".

Fergus confirmed she found out about Venables's recall when officials visited her home in Kirkby, Merseyside.

"Any question I have asked them, I have had no answers and it's about time now I got some answers," she said.

"I am sick of them closing doors in my face. It's about time they started telling me what I think I should know. As James's mother I have a right to know."

However, Straw, who is due to meet Fergus later this week, said releasing further information was "not in the interests of justice" as it could threaten the fairness of any future trial.

• James Bulger murder
• Crime
• Criminal justice
• Psychology

Sam Jones

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 10 Mar 2010 | 3:46 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Another snowy day was expected over the central part of the country Wednesday as two low pressure systems were forecast to combine over the Plains.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Mar 2010 | 2:53 am

Save the planet. But maybe not right now

Doomsaying precludes the possibility of ingenious solutions – and indicates a morbid vanity that we must be the saviours

Isn't it welcome to have Ian McEwan as an advocate for a little optimism in the climate change debate? His hope, expressed in his new novel Solar, that humanity will prove ingenious enough to solve the problem through the skill of coming generations is a welcome change from those who portray our descendants as helpless victims of our "excess".

Their injunctions to "save the world for our children and grandchildren" fly in the face of history, which repeatedly shows how progress – from the wheel to the internet – transforms the world picture as time marches on. The doom brigade has its moments, such as the collapse of the classical world in Europe, the Black Death and the first world war, but they are exceptions to learn from. And we have learned.

Not to the extent of mastering clairvoyancy, however. Like miserabilism, a constant in human behaviour is the inability of Today to successfully imagine Tomorrow. The archive of prophecy and science fiction contains some good guesses, but in general the seers get it wrong. Which of my grandparents, addressing me in the 1950s, could possibly have foreseen today's IT? Which of my grandparents' grandparents had a notion of the bicycle or national parks?

This is true of scientists as much as of the more general type of wise person. Science is too often mistakenly treated in the way that history was by those 19th-century Germans who thought that one day the whole truth could be set down. Certainty is not absolute. Scientists are ambushed by novelty – see Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, Einstein – as often as the rest of us.

None of this is to argue against the risks of global warming or prudence in facing them. It is to warn against vanity, in the form of the exaggerated belief that it is all down to our generation: here, now, hurry, rush. It's also an appeal against pessimism, because of the limitations glumness places on the very potential which, odds-on, will prove the planet's salvation.

A writer in the Economist's most recent green supplement made this point neatly by questioning assumptions (rather reminiscent of Catholic dogma in Galileo's day) that spending the world's limited resources on Tomorrow rather than Today is necessarily morally right. The Economist's writer said: "Since future generations will probably be much richer than we are, it makes no more sense for us to sacrifice our wellbeing for them than it would to expect 18th-century peasants to go without gruel so we can buy more computers."

That is the sort of sally that deserves a wide hearing. If we stall Today's wonderful spread of international knowledge, travel and general prosperity, we risk a future like Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, where unknown Miltons remain mute and inglorious and village Darwins never get further than their shacks.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Climate change
• Ian McEwan

Martin Wainwright

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 10 Mar 2010 | 2:30 am

World's largest meat-eating plant prefers to eat... small animal poo

The largest meat-eating plant in the world is designed not to eat small animals, but small animal poo, scientists discover.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Mar 2010 | 2:29 am

Pioneering Mass. robot lost at sea off Chile coast (AP)

AP - A pioneering deep-sea robot made by Massachusetts researchers has been lost off the coast of Chile.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Mar 2010 | 11:02 pm

Govt has no plans now to sell stake in ONGC, IOC - Oil secy (Reuters)

Reuters - The government has no immediate plans to sell stake in state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) and Indian Oil Corp (IOC), Oil Secretary S. Sundareshan told reporters on Wednesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Mar 2010 |
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 9 Mar 2010 | 10:01 pm

The LHC to Shut Down... Again?

The epic start-up drama surrounding the world's most powerful particle accelerator just took another painful twist.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 9 Mar 2010 | 8:25 pm

A Sweet Deal Soured

It was the blockbuster environmental deal of a lifetime: Florida Governor Charlie Crist announced in 2008 that the state was going to buy 180,000 acres of wetlands from United States Sugar Corporation. The purchase would effectively close U.S. Sugar's doors ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 9 Mar 2010 | 8:12 pm

SpaceX aborts rocket engine test (Reuters)

Reuters - Space Exploration Technologies aborted a test firing of its Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday, in what was to be a key milestone in its quest to fly cargo -- and eventually astronauts -- to the International Space Station.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Mar 2010 | 8:06 pm

SpaceX aborts rocket engine test

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Space Exploration Technologies aborted a test firing of its Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday, in what was to be a key milestone in its quest to fly cargo -- and eventually astronauts -- to the International Space Station.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 9 Mar 2010 | 8:06 pm

Test-Firing of SpaceX Falcon Rocket Aborted

There's flame in the trenches, but not the one Space Exploration Technologies was hoping for, as it counted down Tuesday afternoon to the first test-firing of its new Falcon 9 rocket. Two seconds before the rocket's nine motors were to ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 9 Mar 2010 | 7:51 pm

Shark Zone: A Refuge Where Predators and Tourists Mix

The Maldives government has banned shark fishing in its 35,000 square miles of sovereign waters.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 9 Mar 2010 | 7:20 pm

A new dawn for transgenic crops in Europe?

Approval of the Amflora potato could signal a fresh approach to genetically modified organisms.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 9 Mar 2010 | 6:37 pm

Ring may be giant 'impact crater'

Deforestation has revealed what could be a giant impact crater in Central Africa, according to Italian scientists.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Mar 2010 | 6:26 pm

Stress Changes Who Men Find Attractive

Stress can change who men find attractive.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Mar 2010 | 6:19 pm

Bottled Wind Could Be as Constant as Coal

Wind power has made incredible inroads into the U.S. energy system thanks to big, efficient machines standing hundreds of feet tall. But the future of wind power may be underground.

In the abandoned mines and sandstones of the Midwest, compressed-air storage ventures are trying to convert the intermittent motions of the air into the kind of steady power that could displace coal.

Compressed-air energy storage plants use compressors to store electricity generated when it’s not needed. The air, pumped into large underground formations, is like a spring that’s been squeezed and when it’s needed, it can deliver a large percentage of the energy that it received.

The first and only such plant in the United States went online in 1991, and though the technology didn’t take off, it did prove that it worked. And now, combining cheap wind energy and compressed-air storage could create a potent new force in the electricity markets.

“This is the first nonhydro renewables technology that can replace coal in the dispatch order,” said David Marcus, co-founder of General Compression, a new company that received $16 million in funding from investors including the utility Duke Energy to build a full-scale prototype of their energy storage system, which would be deployed with arrays of wind turbines.

The dispatch order is how grid operators decide which power plants to switch on. They have to balance the amount of generation and consumption or they risk the grid’s stability. The amount of power people use goes up and down, but it stays above a certain level all the time. To meet that need, utilities buy consistent always-on power from the large, cheap coal and nuclear power plants that are the backbone of the electric grid.

The electricity they need to meet the peaks in energy demand is generated by what are known as peaking plants, usually powered by natural gas. When the wind is blowing, it is usually the cheapest peaking power available, so it keeps the natural gas plants shut off. If they want to replace coal plants in the pecking order, though, they’ll have to work all the time.

And to do that, they’ll need a way to unlink themselves from the on-again, off-again nature of the wind.

“It’s a fractal problem,” said Marcus. “You have intermittency problems on every time scale.”

That problem has brought compressed-air energy storage roaring back. Marcus’ company has a long way to go before they can turn their prototype system into the kind of technology that can be deployed at the nation’s vast wind farms. But compressed air storage of one type or another is on the verge of becoming a mainstream power technology.

The nation’s largest energy storage option right now is pumped hydroelectricity. When excess electricity is present in a system, it can be used to pump water up to a reservoir. Then, when that power is needed, the water is sent through a turbine to generate electricity. The U.S. electric system has 2.5 gigawatts of pumped hydro storage capacity, but most of the good, cheap sites are already occupied, and creating new reservoirs is not environmentally benign.

While wind farmers say storage isn’t technically necessary until the amount of wind power on the grid exceeds 20 or 30 percent of the electrical load, private analysts, the Electric Power Research Institute, and the Department of Energy have identified grid-scale storage as a key need for the rapidly diversifying electricity system.

And going forward, compressed-air energy storage looks like the cheapest option available. Independent analysts have come to similar conclusions.

“CAES is the least cost, utility-scale, bulk-storage system available. If other factors such as its low environmental impact and high reliability are considered, CAES has an overwhelming advantage,” one Department of Homeland Security physicist concluded in a 2007 paper in the journal Energy (.pdf).

In the last four months, four projects have gotten new funding. In December, the rights to a long-awaited project in Norton, Ohio, were purchased by First Energy, a large utility in the area. The Norton project could store 2.7 gigawatts of power in an abandoned limestone mine.

In California, PG&E received a $24.9 million grant from the Energy Department to build a 300-megawatt plant in Kern County. New York State Electric and Gas received $29 million for a similar facility in the town of Reading, New York, using an existing salt cavern there. The Iowa Stored Energy Project received a $3.2 million forgivable loan from the state and will finish drilling its first research well in the next month. The plan is to attempt to store energy in porous sandstone, just like the 1.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that lie beneath the surface of the United States.

The man behind the technology slated to be used in the two Energy Department-backed projects is engineer Michael Nakhamkin, founder of Energy Storage Power Corporation. He designed the only U.S. compressed air storage plant, in McIntosh, Alabama.

That plant was built in the late 1980s by a very small southern utility, the Alabama Electric Cooperative. They had a unique problem, Nakhamkin said, in that their daytime load far exceeded their nighttime load, the opposite of the regular pattern.

The big coal plant they needed to meet the daytime demand made too much power at night. Turning down the plant at night wasn’t a good solution because coal plants work most efficiently at full capacity, and turning them down makes them dirtier. And even with the plant at full power during the day, the utility still had to buy power from other companies to meet their peak daytime demand.

But with a storage plant, they could use the extra electricity made at night to satisfy their daytime peak demand.

Based on the first commercial plant (.pdf) ever built in Huntorf, Germany, the Electric Power Research Institute and Nakhamkin’s engineering firm came up with a plan to store compressed air in a salt dome in Alabama. They created a geological pocket 900 feet long and up to 238 feet wide in the dome by pumping water into it to dissolve the rock salt. When the (briny) water was pumped back out, the salt resealed itself and they had an air-tight container: “The solution-mined cavern is a large subterranean pressure vessel,” as an EPRI report explained.

During off-peak times, electricity runs a compressor which pumps the air down into the cavern. Then, when energy is needed, the air is released from the reserve to power a fairly standard turbine, with a little help from natural gas. The system has worked for more than 25 years.

In 1991, when the plant went online, there were high hopes that the technology might catch on among utilities.

‘We expect the CAES plant technology pioneered in Alabama to lead to widespread application in this country,” said Robert Schainker, the manager of the Electric Power Research Institute’s Energy Storage Program in a press release announcing the plant’s completion. ‘Three fourths of the United States has geology suitable for underground air storage. At present, more than a dozen utilities are evaluating sites for CAES application.”

But with low fossil fuel prices and little intermittent renewable energy on the grid, there wasn’t much incentive for utilities to build the plants. The plant saved money for the Alabama Electric Cooperative, but it wasn’t “critical savings” as Nakhamkin put it.

“Rich people don’t talk about how to save five or 10 dollars,” he said.

Planning for the Iowa Stored Energy Project began in 2001, but at the time, it just didn’t make economic sense for the small municipal utilities involved.

“Without a lot of renewables, the business model for CAES is not that strong,” Holst said. With wind sometimes producing as much as 15 percent of Iowa’s electricity, the case for the business gets stronger every day.

Nakhamkin thinks the time has come for compressed air to take off, particularly with the new plant designs that incorporate the data from the McIntosh plant.

“We analyzed several years of plant operation and from this, we generated a second generation of CAES technology,” he said. “It’s much more reliable and much more adjustable for the smart grid, for solar energy and a variety of wind power plants.”

Images: 1) Proposed Iowa compressed air plant./Iowa Stored Energy Project. 2) Compressed air plant in McIntosh, Alabama./Iowa Stored Energy Project.

See Also:

• America’s Wind Energy Potential Triples in New Estimate
• High-Altitude Wind Machines Could Power New York City
• Nation’s First ‘Underwater Wind Turbine’ Installed in Old Man River
• Mile-High Mega Kites Could Pull Giant, Floating Power Plants

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

Men Outlive Women Sexually

Galapagos tension

Ancient eggshell yields its DNA

Collider to shut for year to fix faults

Scientists tease DNA from eggshell of extinct birds (AFP)

AFP - In a world first, scientists in Australia announced on Wednesday they had extracted DNA from the fossilised eggshells of extinct birds, including iconic giants such as the moa and elephant bird.

Men's sexual tastes broaden when they are stressed

The usual rules of sexual attraction go out of the window when men are stressed, say psychologists

Men are drawn to a wider range of women when they are feeling stressed out, according to research into the psychology of sexual attraction.

People are usually attracted to partners with similar facial features to their own, but after a brief but stressful experience, men's preferences changed to include a wider variety of women, the study found.

Relaxed men who took part in the study rated women on average 14% less appealing if they looked very different from themselves compared with women who looked similar. But a group of stressed men found dissimilar women 9% more attractive.

Johanna Lass-Hennemann, who led the study at the University of Trier in Germany, said the findings echo research suggesting that animals lose their normal mating preferences when they are under stress.

"Men have a tendency to approach dissimilar mates and to rate these to be more pleasant when they are acutely stressed," Lass-Hennemann said. "[But] we are not sure how this might reflect in true mating decisions."

Scientists suspect the appeal of similar-looking partners may be linked to our tendency to have more trust in a familiar face, a factor that is important for long-term relationships. Under stress, however, the importance of pairing up with someone similar-looking seems to vanish.

Lass-Hennemann speculates that stress might increase men's tendency to "outbreed", or reproduce with more genetically dissimilar women, with the potential benefit that any children born from the relationship might be better equipped to cope with a stressful environment.

"We think that chronically stressful environments should increase outbreeding, because inbreeding may lead to offspring that are not genetically diverse enough to deal with the varying circumstances that a risky and stressful environment imposes on them," she said.

In the study, 50 healthy heterosexual male students were divided into two groups. Those in the first group were asked to plunge one arm into a bucket of icy water for three minutes before taking part in the test. Those in the second group were asked to do the same, but with water heated to body temperature.

Measurements of the volunteers' heart rates and levels of the stress hormone cortisol indicated that the men in the first group were significantly more stressed before the test began than those in the second.

In the test itself, the men were shown a series of images on a computer screen. Some were of household objects, but others were of naked women. Some of the women's faces had been digitally altered to resemble either the person being tested or another man in the group.

Throughout the test, the scientists played occasional bursts of noise to startle the men and recorded their reactions. Previous research suggests people startle less when they are looking at something they find attractive. The men were also asked to rate the images by how appealing and arousing they were.

While men in the control group performed as expected and were more attracted to women who looked like them, the stressed men consistently rated the unfamiliar women as more appealing. Their startle reactions confirmed their preferences.

The research is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Lass-Hennemann said it is highly unlikely that the acute stresses of everyday life can switch someone's tastes when it comes to choosing a partner, but long-term stress might shift male preferences towards women who are more dissimilar.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Mar 2010 | 5:09 pm

Eggshell DNA could help reconstruct lives of extinct birds

Ancient DNA has been extracted from the fossilised eggshells of birds for the first time, and will eventually yield clues about their physiology, diet and how they went extinct

Scientists have collected DNA from the fossilised eggshells of birds that died hundreds and in some cases thousands of years ago.

The oldest eggshell to yield DNA came from an Australian emu that died around 19,000 years ago. It is the first time that scientists have succeeded in extracting ancient DNA from the fossilised eggshells of a bird.

Genetic material from the Madagascan elephant bird, the heaviest bird that ever lived, was also recovered, along with DNA from Australian owls, New Zealand ducks and flightless moas.

Elephant birds were native to Madagascar but had gone extinct by the 17th century. The ostrich-like creatures grew to around 3 metres tall and weighed up to half a tonne. Their eggs were bigger than footballs.

Eggshells from two other extinct species, the little bush moa and the heavy footed moa, both from New Zealand's north island, were estimated to be more than 3,000 years old. Attempts to collect DNA from a 50,000-year-old flightless Australian bird from the genus Genyornis failed because the DNA had degraded too much.

The ancient DNA has yet to be sequenced, but researchers will soon be looking to draw up genetic profiles of long-lost birds by extracting genetic material from eggshells held in museums and excavated at archaeological and fossil sites.

Previously, they had little hope of reading DNA from species that lived in warm climates because the genetic material breaks down so quickly.

By sequencing the genomes of ancient birds, scientists hope to build up a better picture of their physiology and how they dispersed and split into different species. It may even be possible to surmise their diets from genes encoding the enzymes for digesting particular types of food.

Charlotte Oskam, who led the study at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, is now analysing a large collection of eggshells from ancient sites in New Zealand and hopes that DNA profiles of the birds will help explain how the arrival of humans brought about the extinction of the giant moa around 500 years ago.

The researchers used a technique called confocal microscopy to see exactly where the DNA is located inside the egg shells of two of the extinct birds, the New Zealand giant moa and the Madagascan elephant bird.

From this they were able to say that the DNA almost certainly comes from the mother hen rather than the embryo growing inside the egg. When the egg moves away from the ovary, cells from the mother get mixed up in the calcium carbonate shell as it thickens.

The research, reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, does not mean scientists will soon be able to resurrect long-extinct birds. Although the DNA can be sequenced, scientists would need to know how to repackage it into chromosomes, the giant molecules that carry genes.

The same problem makes it unlikely that scientists will bring woolly mammoths back to life, even though their DNA has been sequenced from well-preserved specimens recovered from the Siberian permafrost.

"As with all ancient DNA, the DNA we isolated from eggshell is very fragmented," said Oskam. It will be possible to sequence extinct genomes from fossil eggshell, he said, "but it is a huge leap to imagine we can clone an extinct species."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Mar 2010 | 5:05 pm

A Hippocratic oath for scientists

I agree with George Monbiot (Comment, 9 March) about the problems of communicating science, but it is a pity he did not mention the large amount of outreach work being done by scientists these days to address the very issues he raises, much of it in collaboration with Café Scientifique, a network of voluntary local initiatives in towns up and down the UK, and, indeed, the world. There is a Hippocratic oath for scientists, although it is not yet compulsory. It is called the Pugwash Pledge, and can be found at (www.spusa.org/pledge).

"I promise to work for a better world, where science and technology are used in socially responsible ways. I will not use my education for any purpose intended to harm human beings or the environment. Throughout my career, I will consider the ethical implications of my work before I take action. While the demands placed upon me may be great, I sign this declaration because I recognise that individual responsibility is the first step on the path to peace."

He might also be pleased to hear that very few of us wear beards these days.

Jim Grozier

Organiser, Brighton Café Scientifique

• What Peter Preston (Wanted: an eco prophet, 8 March) appears to omit is the emergence of eco-crankism – the proliferation of eco-friendly initiatives by a new class of do-gooder apparatchiks advising backyard gardeners to grow £1 carrots, use fashion-styled cotton carrier bags, cycle in fume-choked streets and boycott budget airlines. With this obscurantism there is no way the message of a more equitable distribution of the earth's dwindling resources can get through.

Julian Siann

Edinburgh

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Mar 2010 | 5:05 pm

Fossilized Eggshells Yield DNA

Better Than Apollo: The Space Program We Almost Had

SAN FRANCISCO — In the late 1950s, American space companies jumped into a headlong race to build an aerospace industry that could launch missiles across the world and rockets above it.

In her new book Another Science Fiction, archivist Megan Prelinger delves into the hyperbolic, whimsical world of the advertisements these early aerospace companies created to sell themselves.

Far from the dry, technical ads you might imagine, companies like Northrup, Ex-Cell-O, and National tried to lure the most talented young engineers into their cubicles by drawing on the mystique of science fiction. Ball-bearing, engine-part, and guidance-system companies didn’t sell themselves, but rather the grand vision of space exploration as the next step in mankind’s destiny.

The book is lovingly crafted and exhaustively researched. Unlike so many “big idea” tomes that skip over the details to deliver the PowerPoint version of reality, Another Science Fiction glories in the details, providing a complex portrait of the nation’s spacefaring ambitions. Prelinger’s analysis reaches outside the narrow confines of space boosterism to reveal the neural connections in the American psyche between the final frontier, the Soviet menace, and good, old industrial engineering.

We caught up with Prelinger at the wonderfully strange library she runs with her husband, Rick, to ogle old space stuff and discuss countercultural space utopias, alternatives to Apollo, and her hopes for a human spaceflight renaissance.

Image: Willi Baum.

Wired.com: Your book focuses on your amazing collection of space ephemera, particularly the advertisements of the aerospace companies that eagerly lapped up NASA cash. It’s kind of strange: what were they advertising for? And what tropes and themes did they tend to use?

Megan Prelinger: The companies were mostly advertising for recruitment. They were in a position of being funded to develop a civil space program that would be a nearly a whole new industry — from scratch. As well as responding to a steeply escalating Cold War that “demanded” massive missile proliferation. The companies needed to hire thousands of engineers to develop bids for NASA and DOD contracts, and hundreds of thousands of workers to build the new machines. They needed to hire those people in just a few years. And they did.

They tended to use tropes borrowed from science fiction and from mid-century modern design to convey a sense of fantasy and possibility around the process of technological emergence that was erupting. Imagery that was culturally associated with space exploration dominated, as the civil space program was the leading public face of rocket-and-missile work. Weapons development was more tacitly than explicitly expressed in the tropes and themes. The companies and NASA both wanted to inspire people, and they used whatever visual language they could to achieve that goal. Motifs of sci-fi influenced space exploration were prevalent, but also the trope of “space will be our new home,” is expressed in a lot of ways. Mostly through images of the human body in space, but also in imagery that frames outer space as an extension of the domestic environment, and a zone for new architectural invention.

Wired.com: What attracted you to this particular set of artifacts? Were you looking for stories of rocket advertisements past?

Prelinger: I’m a citizen-interpreter of the American West, a landscape aficionado, and a Cold War history buff. I was originally geopolitically awakened and politicized by the early-1980s crises in nuclear politics. When I first picked up these magazines and started to read them, I was looking for untold stories of the militarized American west and untold stories of our atomic nightmare. I thought there might be material in these magazines that would point to other interesting areas of research. I have also always been very interested in space exploration and its history, but at the time I thought I mostly knew the outline of the history of NASA. I didn’t expect to be surprised in that area.

Every discovery I made in the magazines that went into the book was an utter serendipity. I am not a terribly visual person and I wasn’t looking for the ads. I just happened upon them while reading the articles. As I gained momentum in reading the magazines, it hit me in a “Eureka!” moment: that the ads formed a visual language of their own that spoke to all the historical, ideological, and technological complexities that were embedded in the massive changes of the era in history. THAT was the story. The visual language. The idea framework for the book emerged almost overnight, an abrupt serendipity.

Wired.com: Your book seems fundamentally about the space race as an industrial opportunity. The space race here is individual and much more about career advancement than human advancement. How did companies adapt and borrow the grand themes of human advancement to support their own far more limited aims?

Prelinger: Human spaceflight is a cultural project; the mechanics to get us there are an industrial project. The ads represent the convergence of these two aims. At the baseline of course the companies were motivated by profit; at the same time the people working within industry were largely genuinely driven by a sense of contributing to an exciting period of emerging technology. I think the same can be said of our Silicon Valley giants of today. How can you separate career advancement from human advancement among the people giving their lives to Big Tech today?

Wired.com:The beauty of the ads and the grandeur of space provided cover for the many military projects that aerospace companies undertook during this Cold War period. If you had to say, do you think the dual military/civilian nature of space technologies hurt the long-range prospects of spacefaring or helped?

Prelinger: Oh, that’s complicated. The military complex enabled a lot of technological transformations that wouldn’t have happened — or would have taken much, much longer– in a peaceful environment. So in a basic technological sense, the military enabled spacefaring. We wouldn’t have had rockets powerful enough to launch satellites into orbit if we had not been developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. The rockets were a side project and a surplus of the missile research. It would be nice to imagine that we could’ve/would’ve funded the development of orbit-capable launch vehicles without the stimulus of the Cold War, but it’s unrealistic.

At the same time, the militarized nature of the early space program hurt it tremendously (tremendously!) by costing it a lot of its legitimacy as a civil-scientific enterprise. Viz. the conversation with Willi Baum that is quoted at the end of the book. Willi has said to me, “I’m a leftist! Of course there is no such thing as the space program!” That’s what he believes. He doesn’t understand how I can be a naturalist and wildlife rehabilitator and a space advocate at the same time. A lot of people think as he does — that the whole civil space program is just a fig leaf for our hyper-nationalist and hyper-militarized technological will to power. I see that it is more than that, but among the social justice community it’s very hard to convince people that there really is a hugely important civil-scientific aspect of space exploration (climate science research, anyone?). As a member of the social and ecological justice communities it’s sometimes hard for me to be “out” as a space fan. All because of this intense confusion/conflation and commingling of resources between military and civil space. That part is very regrettable.

Wired.com: The space race was intimately tied to the military ambitions of the Cold War superpowers, but you uncover and describe several more human alternatives, a kind of countercultural space program. Perhaps you can tell us what people like Stewart Brand and Princeton physicists Gerard O’Neill were up to?

Prelinger: The migration of space into the counterculture is a big story. You might be interested in Robert Poole’s book Earthrise, which is a cultural history of the image of earth from space. Stewart Brand was responsible for the integration of space themed visual imagery (the earthrise photo) into the counterculture. But back in the 1970s, through his initiative in developing the California Water Atlas, he led the cultural turn from space back toward Earth. He was really the first to notice and develop the fact that earthrise was more than a pretty picture: it stood for the emerging truth that our journey into space really made more meaning for us out of Planet Earth than it did out of space itself. He befriended astronaut Rusty Schweikart and integrated discussions about space exploration into the everyday discourse of the CoEvolution Quarterly, his post-Whole Earth Catalog magazine. Those discussions really seem pot-infused and diffuse to me. But they definitely express a perspective that space exploration is a natural and desirable expression of a combined techno-power and woo-woo state of things. Those conversations are heavily marked as countercultural in a number of ways.

At the same time Gerard O’Neill was coming from a different place and a different perspective. As a physics professor at Princeton he was much more Eastern Establishment and institutional than Brand. But his studies of physics convinced him that human beings could, and should, colonize space in huge numbers. He believed it was technologically and economically feasible to build huge orbital floating terraria that would be hyper-verdant and would house and feed thousands of people. He formed his own node of the counterculture just by being so extreme in his views. He was well-connected enough to gain an appointment at NASA, and NASA sponsored one of his studies and published it as a government document. That document is one of my favorite pieces of space ephemera. O’Neill also popularized his vision through the book The High Frontier; the book’s ideas were so far outside most peoples’ frame of reference that they represented a countercultural ideal. It’s important to also notice that his ideas weren’t utterly different from those espoused by the ex-Nazi hyper-militarized space visionary Wernher von Braun in the 1950s. von Braun’s ideas were assimilable in American culture because they were military themed. O’Neill’s peace-and-trees version of that vision was associated (I think) with the counterculture as much just by virtue of its pacifism as by anything else.

Wired.com: In reading about the 70s space utopias, I couldn’t help thinking back to the 1840s, when railroads started to open up the West, by which I mean the area beyond the Appalachians, and all that land seemed like a great place to test out all the philosophical ideas about the way to live that were bubbling out of the industrializing cities. You draw a lot of parallels between how people thought about frontiers (”The Final Frontier”) and space. How was exploring space different from exploring, say, Arizona or the Antarctic?

Prelinger: I’d love to have time to write an essay-length reply to this question. I did try to address this question in Chapter Four by making the point that we tried to make it like exploring Arizona, but it wasn’t. And that’s why a lot of our dreams and initiatives failed to reach fruition. We imagined we could colonize space as easily as the Europeans moved in to North America. — perhaps even easier, because there wouldn’t be pre-existing sapiens cultures to push out. Almost as if forgetting that we can’t breathe or eat or live or build in space. The “science fiction” aspect of future visualizations grossly overstepped reality by too swiftly suggesting a land-based model of colonization where such a model just could not operate.

It would have been better if space had been conceptualized more like Antarctica; a place where survival was really unlikely for early explorers, and would never be anything other than extraordinarily difficult for those who would follow them. NASA maintains research stations in Antarctica devoted not only to polar studies of planetary science, but also research into living in extreme environments. Human beings will have to adapt into extremophiles in order to live on the Moon or Mars.

Wired.com: At one point you write that “The twelve-year race between the United States and the USSR to reach the Moon was simple compared to the battle for satellite supremacy,” you write. That’s a fascinating statement because it goes against the entrenched idea that it was Apollo which formed the core of the American space program.

Prelinger: As soon as satellite launch technology was proven, many countries and many companies wanted to have a presence in the satellite sky. Competition was swift and multilateral. The binary nationalist “Moon-or-bust” competition between the US and the USSR was not really attainable by other countries, much less by companies. So it remained a simple binary for a long time. But the satellite sky was (and is) a much more accessible forum for crowding and competition. Apollo may have been the public face of the American space program, but we have always had a lot more going on with robotics than with human spaceflight. From a structural and functional perspective, satellites are the core of the American space program. Have been since 1958.

Wired.com: I think most people see NASA (and the American space program) as basically Vanguard to Apollo to the Shuttle. Maybe they throw Hubble in there. But you recover a huge chunk of space history where the moon shot was by no means assured and where human spaceflight seems as if it could have gone many places. Maybe not just or never to the moon. You make the argument that Apollo caused a kind of public amnesia about the competing alternative space programs that might have been. Can you describe the criticisms of and alternatives to Apollo in the scientific community and the media?

Prelinger: The criticisms of Apollo were comparable to the criticisms of human spaceflight today. The criticisms are based on a schism between space for science, by scientists, and space for exploration, by explorers. It is true now as it was then that robotic spaceflight is vastly less expensive and technologically difficult, and yields tangible scientific rewards. Scientists mocked the Apollo program because the life support system had to dominate the payload of the spacecraft to such an extent that only a few pounds of scientific equipment — sensors and sample collectors — could be included. That schism still exists, though within NASA great steps have been taken to resolve it as an internal contradiction.

Ambitious non-Apollo plans that were regrettably un-funded included a plan for a multi-planet flyby by a space probe in the 1970s. There was an alignment of the planets in the 1970s that meant a multi-planet probe could go on a “grand tour” and get a lot more bang for its buck than at any time in the late 20th or 21st centuries. Hey look, this idea has a wiki entry: Planetary Grand Tour.

Some people think that the emphasis on human spaceflight overshadowed what could have been public and political support for this Grand Tour. Other people think that it would have been canceled in the 1970s anyway, just because of the economic contraction. For the same reasons Apollo was canceled.

Wired.com: You write in your book, “With fifty years’ hindsight the tone of the popular press stories of the late 1950s criticizing human spaceflight seems cartoonishly overblown.” Is that really fair? It seems to me that the criticisms of the manned spaceflight program were pretty robust, the Apollo landing notwithstanding. What do you think the best argument for human spaceflight is? And do you think we should be attempting to send humans into space now?

Prelinger: I am a supporter of human spaceflight. I want to see it happen, and I will do what I can to promote it as a cultural enterprise. But it needs to be re-framed as a cultural enterprise. Our human spaceflight program was a civil public institution. Its primary functions were symbolic, inspirational, and cultural. It was a positive, non-destructive expression of the urge to explore and to “conquer” (space is un-conquerable, so space exploration de-fangs the conquering impulse). It was a positive, non-destructive expression of technological upsmanship. It was a positive, non-destructive expression of the human impulse to continuously expand our sense of territoriality. It can be those things again in the future, and I’d like to see that happen. Its most important job was to inspire young people to see themselves as junior members of an advanced, highly-accomplished society, and to identify positively and peacefully with technology. In its early years, that effect was worldwide. Space exploration has the potential to transcend nationalism. I have no doubt that the Apollo program inspired many young people to think higher than they would have without its symbolism in front of them, and I’d like to see that inspiration come back.

That being said, the Apollo program in particular was an artifact of a major post-war economic and technological surplus. We no longer have that surplus, we have spent it. I have to agree on a practical level with the cancellation of the Constellation programs. NASA’s robotic programs are the ones that bring home the bacon, in terms of new knowledge and important scientific discoveries. I’m sorry that we are losing it as a public program, but it will be reborn as some kind of hybrid public-private partnership. Private “new space” enterprise is hard at work developing human spaceflight alternatives, but it will be really hard for them to do that without some technology transfer from NASA. I see public-private partnerships as the way of the future.

I’m of two minds about the privatization of human spaceflight. On the one hand, I hate to see it lost as a public, democratic institution. On the other hand, the expense and the risk are utterly enormous. It seems more appropriate to me for private companies to take the risk and make the expense, rather than our heavily stressed taxpayer base. And it’s not as much of a dichotomy as it seems on the surface because even when human spaceflight was a “public, democratic” institution, the profits from it still all went to private industry.

Wired.com: One interesting argument you make is that the selection of a design for the Apollo rocketry and system actually stopped a lot of the more futuristic design proposals out there. Do you think the lack of a program of record now that NASA has effectively cancelled Constellation will re-open people’s minds and allow them to imagine new paths for NASA?

Prelinger: I was just discussing this question with a NASA staffer at the SpaceUp conference in San Diego this past weekend. NASA is definitely at a bit of an identity crisis. At least the parts of NASA dedicated to human spaceflight are at an identity crisis. The cancellation of Constellation will result in a huge infusion of moneys into the “new space” companies that are developing non-NASA rocket systems. Those systems are going to be bound to the same rules of physics as NASA rockets, yet they will innovate in design and function to some extent.

As for new paths for NASA well, that’s a big subject. What NASA does best and most importantly is robotic planetary science. No one in the world does that as well as NASA. Exploring Mars, bringing back samples of Martian soil — and using knowledge about Martian planetary science to help Earth sciences people understand our own planet’s evolutionary history — THAT’s what NASA does best. Increasing public awareness and appreciation about this really important, urgent, and fascinating work is NASA’s biggest hurdle.

I’d of course love to see the breakdown of existing structures lead to a creative eruption in design and technology. That could be visually as well as technologically interesting and exciting. It remains to be seen though, how “different” spacecraft can look, now that the limiting factors of design, materials, and physics are much better known than they were in the 1950s.

Wired.com: Science fiction, the entertainment not the advertisements, seems to thread its way through your narrative as in the hilariously titled sci-fi magazine, Satellite Science Fiction, which you note “published articles about science fact alongside fiction.” What was the relationship between science and science fiction in the late 50s and has it changed over the last 50 years?

Prelinger: In the 1950s, science and science fiction were close mutual contextualizers. The magazine Analog ran half science / half fiction articles in its table of contents every issue. The science fiction writer Fritz Leiber was commissioned to write a story — or a story of his was appropriated — by Los Alamos National Laboratory for an advertisement. The advertisement was actually just a block of copy from the story, with the Laboratory’s logo at the bottom. Also, writers such as Arthur C. Clarke wrote fiction that was directly based on working plans for emerging technologies, such as “The Wind from the Sun” about a solar wind ship. The relationship between science and sci-fi did not get much closer than it was during those years.

Today I think that relationship is a bit more diffuse. It has moved on to the realm of computers. The relationship between the world created by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash and Second Life is pretty close, but not as close as the examples above from the 1950s. And of course the relationship between sci-fi literature and the real stories of technological emergence vary quite a bit with media type. Narrative film has always been more adventure-oriented than technology-oriented. In the 1950s that relationship was probably closer than it is today — the ships themselves were part of the adventure. In contemporary sci-fi narrative film I think I see evidence that we as an audience have become desensitized to the various promises offered by advanced spacefaring technology. For instance in District 9, the spaceship is very much in the background. Though to really use District 9 as an example we’d have to also look at the centrality of the “gene therapy” theme in the story which is very much out of today’s science news headlines.

In sum I’d say that the relationship is not quite as close-seeming as it was back then, but it’s still there. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction runs occasional columns by scientists working at the Exploratorium. But that’s less than five percent of the magazine’s content.

Images: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

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

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Your Computer Really Is a Part of You

An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves.

The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition.

“The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.”

Chemero’s experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts: that people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us.

This idea, called “ready-to-hand,” has influenced artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, but without being directly tested.

In the new study, Chemero tracked the hand movements of people using a mouse to guide a cursor during a series of motor tests. Part way through the tests, the cursor lagged behind the mouse. After a few seconds, it worked again. When Chemero’s team analyzed how people moved the mouse, they found profound differences between patterns produced during mouse function and malfunction.

When the mouse worked, hand motions followed a mathematical form known as “one over frequency,” or pink noise. It’s a pattern that pops up repeatedly in the natural world, from universal electromagnetic wave fluctuations to tidal flows to DNA sequences. Scientists don’t fully understand pink noise, but there’s evidence that our cognitive processes are naturally attuned to it.

But when Chemero’s mouse malfunctioned, the pink noise vanished. Computer malfunction made test subjects aware of it — what Heidegger called “unreadiness-at-hand” — and the computer was no longer part of their cognition. Only when the mouse started working again did cognition return to normal. (One assumes, though the researchers didn’t test the proposition, that cognition would also have returned to normal had test subjects stood up and stopped using the computer.)

The results demonstrate how people fuse with their tools, said Chemero.

“The thing that does the thinking is bigger than your biological body,” he said. “You’re so tightly coupled to the tools you use that they’re literally part of you as a thinking, behaving thing.”

Asked whether computer malfunction — say, the iPhone’s notorious keyboard lag — could thusly be viewed as a discontinuity in our selves, Chemero said, “Yes, that’s exactly what it is.”

Image: At left, Martin Heidegger/WikiMedia Commons; at right, a schematic of the systemic interactions experienced while using (a) a functional tool and (b) a malfunctioning tool/PLoS ONE.

See Also:

• How to Use Neuroscience to Become Your Avatar
• Rubber Hand Trick Reveals Brain-Body Link
• Tool Use Found in Octopuses
• Neanderthals Not Dumb, but Made Dull Gadgets

Citation: “A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand.” By Dobromir G. Dotov, Lin Nie, Anthony Chemero. PLoS ONE, Vol. 5 No. 3, March 9, 2010.

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

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Mile-High Mega Kites Could Pull Giant, Floating Power Plants

Take a huge oceanic catamaran, stick a hydroelectric turbine underneath it, and hitch it to a 6.5 million-square-foot parafoil flying nearly a mile in the air. That’s a Korean research team’s new proposal for generating gigawatts of clean energy.

As the parafoil pulls the boat, seawater would be forced through the turbine, which generates electricity. The 800 megawatts of electricity produced would separate seawater into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis, and the hydrogen would then be stored on-board the ships.

“The calculation shows that, with a large such ship, a gigawatt order electrical power may be harvested by this system,” wrote Park Chul of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute and Kim Jongchul of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in the journal Energy in March.

“If such ships are deployed at 20-km (12.4-mile) intervals over two temperate zones, one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere and the other everywhere in the Southern Hemisphere, the total power produced will be many times that needed by the world,” they wrote.

The new system is a remarkable, if a bit wacky, synthesis of different lines of new energy R&D. Park and Kim rightly note that parafoils — large industrial-strength kites — are now used by the German company Skysails to reduce the fuel consumption of ocean-going vessels by up to 35 percent.

High-altitude wind power using similar parafoils has received increasing attention from entrepreneurs and green tech backers like Google.org because the higher you go, the better and steadier the winds are.

And small groups have been working on hydroelectric generators mounted to sailboats.

But it’s fair to say that though the system is largely a recombination of things that are on the cusp of feasibility, nothing even remotely similar has been tried, or even suggested, by anyone. As such, the components such a plant would need are not currently manufactured. For example, the largest commercially available parafoil has an area of just 6,835 square feet, or about 945 times smaller than the wing the researchers propose.

The idea doesn’t even have a catchy name yet. Perhaps it could be called the “hydro paraplant.”

“Wind power generation with a parawing on ships, a proposal” in Energy 35 (2010) 1425–1432 by J. Kim and C. Park

Images: 1. Skysails. 2-4. Kim and Park.

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

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Not all dinosaurs were wiped out by the Chicxulub meteorite. We too may be in the midst of mass extinction

Everyone loves an apocalypse, and none more so than the one that sped the dinosaurs to their now legendary status. Having been a popular theory for 30 years, last week scientists finally reached a consensus that it was indeed the after-effects of a juggernaut meteorite crashing 65 million years ago into what we now call Chicxulub in Mexico that triggered the end of the dinosaurs' reign on Earth.

The reasons for loving this particular catastrophe are easy to understand. Dinosaurs are awesome. Giant meteorites are awesome. And of course, the combination of the two opened the door for the rise of the mammals. Our own story begins with that cataclysm.

"Consensus" has unfortunately become a dirty word outside the scientific world, thanks to those who disagree with the overwhelming majority of scientists about man-made global warming, but fail to offer any science in return. Unlike climate change, though, many issues remain with this extinction event. Sixty-five million years later, the pattern of extinction looks decidedly uneven. Dinosaurs were wiped out, but many similar-sized crocodiles survived. Amphibians managed to come out of this apocalypse relatively unscathed. Sharks survived, but plesiosaurs perished. Much work remains to be done.

Nevertheless, this consensus on the fate of the dinosaurs is welcomed by people such as me who worry about such things. But let's not get too attached to it. On the grand scale of extinctions, the Chicxulub meteorite is a drop in the ocean. There have been five major extinctions in the history of life. 251 million years ago was the big mama, erasing 95% of sea species and 70% of land life.

It is important to recognise that although 10-mile-wide rocks crashing from space are not the norm, extinction itself is. About 97% of all species that have ever existed currently do not. We may be in the midst of a mass extinction, though probably not on the scale of those 65 or 251 million years ago. Up to a third of all species are "committed to extinction", according to current models.

But it is the speed at which we are losing species that is truly significant. The explosion caused by the Chicxulub meteorite would have been enormous, melting rocks into glass, and vomiting forth mile-high tsunamis. But don't assume that the dinosaurs abruptly keeled over. In the aptly named Hell Creek in Montana, dinosaur fossils have been found dating from up to 40,000 years after the impact.

Climate change is also the planetary norm, but the rate at which the climate is changing since industrialisation is unprecedented. This is reason enough to accept the scientific consensus that we are the root cause, and the same goes for current extinctions.

We have evolved the capability to partially excuse ourselves from natural cataclysms, at least at a species level. Our ability to adapt and survive far outstrips the speed of the same process in natural selection. Should a colossal rock fall from the sky and block out the sun for a thousand years, the effect on humankind would be devastating, but not terminal. Should we continue to ravage the Earth's resources to the extent that human life is unsustainable, it is not in the realm of total fantasy for us to ditch this planet, and set up somewhere else in the universe.

But these are not reasons to be complacent. We exist as a part of this planet, not merely on it. The loss of biodiversity from a mass extinction will be devastating to everyone's lives. Unlike with the previous extinctions, we have the power to slow this current one. We will all have to change our lifestyles to adapt to the world that we have created, but by moderating our impact on extinction, that change won't have to be apocalyptic.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Mar 2010 | 9:04 am