Video: How Do Drone Attacks Work?

 Unmanned aircraft at forefront of U.S. counter-terrorism program to make terrorists assume room temperature.

Can Red Wine Ingredient Stop Breast Cancer Growth?

New research indicates resveratrol can stop malignant breast tumor growth.

(Medical Press)- Cheers! A new research report appearing in the October 2011 issue of The FASEB Journal shows that resveratrol, the "healthy" ingredient in red wine, stops breast cancer cells from growing by blocking the growth effects of estrogen. This discovery, made by a team of American and Italian scientists, suggests for the first time that resveratrol is able to counteract the malignant progression since it inhibits the proliferation of hormone resistant breast cancer cells. This has important implications for the treatment of women with breast cancer whose tumors eventually develop resistance to hormonal therapy.

"Resveratrol is a potential pharmacological tool to be exploited when breast cancer become resistant to the hormonal therapy," said Sebastiano Andò, a researcher involved in the work from the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Calabria in Italy.

To make this discovery, Andò and colleagues used several breast cancer cell lines expressing the estrogen receptor to test the effects of resveratrol. Researchers then treated the different cells with resveratrol and compared their growth with cells left untreated. They found an important reduction in cell growth in cells treated by resveratrol, while no changes were seen in untreated cells. Additional experiments revealed that this effect was related to a drastic reduction of estrogen receptor levels caused by resveratrol itself.

Meet the record-breaking cat with two faces (video)

This two-faced cat is 12 years old. That is a Guinness record.

2-Faced Cat Sets Record

The ability of forests, plants and soil to remove CO2 from the air has been under-estimated

In-spite of the science of global warming climate change being settled, we seem to be learning new things everyday.

(PHYSORG)- The ability of forests, plants and soil to suck carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air has been under-estimated, according to a study on Wednesday that challenges a benchmark for calculating the greenhouse-gas problem.

Like the sea, the land is a carbon "sink", or sponge, helping to absorb heat-trapping CO2 disgorged by the burning of fossil fuels.

A conventional estimate is that soil and vegetation take in roughly 120 billion tonnes, or gigatonnes, of carbon each year through the natural process of photosynthesis.

The new study, published in the science journal Nature, says the uptake could be 25-45 percent higher, to 150-175 gigatonnes per year.

But relatively little of this extra carbon is likely to be stored permanently in the plant, say the researchers. Instead, it is likely to re-enter the atmosphere through plant respiration.

This will be a disappointment for those looking for some good news in the fight against climate change.

Great New Image: Fried Egg Nebula

This is the best picture ever taken of a yellow hypergiant. Astronomers used ESO's Very Large Telescope for the image.

ScienceDaily — Astronomers have used ESO's Very Large Telescope to image a colossal star that belongs to one of the rarest classes of stars in the Universe, the yellow hypergiants. The new picture is the best ever taken of a star in this class and shows for the first time a huge dusty double shell surrounding the central hypergiant. The star and its shells resemble an egg white around a yolky center, leading the astronomers to nickname the object the Fried Egg Nebula.

Credit: ESO/E. Lagadec

Video: Dumbest Stuff on Wheels

Vehicular mayhem from SPEED show, an unusual boat launch and tiller racing.

Dumbest Stuff on Wheels

Sleep Learning May Be Real

A new study suggests people may be learning while sleeping.

ScienceDaily  — People may be learning while they're sleeping -- an unconscious form of memory that is still not well understood, according to a study by Michigan State University researchers.

The findings are highlighted in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

"We speculate that we may be investigating a separate form of memory, distinct from traditional memory systems," said Kimberly Fenn, assistant professor of psychology and lead researcher on the project. "There is substantial evidence that during sleep, your brain is processing information without your awareness and this ability may contribute to memory in a waking state."

In the study of more than 250 people, Fenn and Zach Hambrick, associate professor of psychology, suggest people derive vastly different effects from this "sleep memory" ability, with some memories improving dramatically and others not at all. This ability is a new, previously undefined form of memory.

The World's Oldest Running Car (video)

The world's oldest running car is for sale. It get 1/2 a mile per gallon.

The car seats four people back-to-back. It has no steering wheel – just a tiller that looks like the handle of a shovel. There’s a water tank under the seats for fuel. The car gets about half a mile per gallon.

It ran in the first automobile race in 1887, clocking a top speed of 37 mph, according to the auction house. It didn’t win.

“For 1884, for any car to be this complete is amazing,” said Alain Squindo, the editor in chief of catalogs at RM Auctions, which will sell the car on the afternoon of Oct. 7 in Hershey, Penn.

Cool: The Dead Sea scrolls are now available digitally online!

The Dead Sea scrolls are now available digitally online!

The Dead Sea Scrolls Online

(PHYSORG)- Two thousand years after they were written and decades after they were found in desert caves, some of the world-famous Dead Sea Scrolls went online for the first time on Monday in a project launched by Israel's national museum and the web giant Google.

The appearance of five of the most important Dead Sea scrolls on the Internet is part of a broader attempt by the custodians of the celebrated manuscripts — who were once criticized for allowing them to be monopolized by small circles of scholars — to make them available to anyone with a computer.

The scrolls include the biblical Book of Isaiah, the manuscript known as the Temple Scroll, and three others. Surfers can search high-resolution images of the scrolls for specific passages, zoom in and out, and translate verses into English.

Tevatron particle accelerator closing

The European CERN has made the Tevatron particle accelerator obsolete.

(PHYSORG)- The era of big American physics ends Friday with the retirement of the Tevatron particle accelerator, which has been recreating the Big Bang under four miles of Illinois prairie for 25 years.

The Tevatron has been rendered obsolete by a more powerful atom smasher -- the world's largest -- built in the Alps on the French-Swiss border by the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), a consortium of 20 member nations.

It seems unlikely that the United States, which once dominated the field and reaped the rewards of discoveries and technological innovations, will be able to muster the resources to build the next big particle physics project.

Long-term funding is simply too hard to come by.

Instead, American physicists will concentrate on more precise -- and less expensive -- questions at home and work with CERN on high-energy projects like the search for the elusive 'God' particle.
"In our field we don't keep beating our heads if we have been outdone by another machine," said Pier Oddone, director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which operates the Tevatron.

Video: Human skin strengthened with spider silk can stop a bullet

Layers of spider silk embedded in skin is 3 times stronger than Kevlar.

Spanish researchers develop magnetic cloak

Credit: J. Prat-Camps; A. Sanchez, C. Navau, D.-X. Chen/Autonomous U. of Barcelona

Spanish researchers have designed an 'antimagnet.'

ScienceDaily —  Spanish researchers have designed what they believe to be a new type of magnetic cloak, which shields objects from external magnetic fields, while at the same time preventing any magnetic internal fields from leaking outside, making the cloak undetectable.

The development of such a device, described as an 'antimagnet', could offer many beneficial applications, such as protecting a ship's hull from mines designed to detonate when a magnetic field is detected, or allowing patients with pacemakers or cochlear implants to use medical equipment.

In their study, published Sept. 23, in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society's New Journal of Physics, researchers have proved that such a cloak could be built using practical and available materials and technologies, and used to develop an array of applications.

Take, for example, a patient with a pacemaker undergoing an MRI scan. If an MRI's large magnetic field interacts with the pacemaker, it can cause serious damage to both the device and the patient. The metal in the pacemaker could also interact with and distort the MRI's large magnetic field, affecting the machine's detection capabilities.

The researchers, from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, are aware that the technology could also be used by criminals to dodge security systems, for example in airports and shops, but they are confident that the new research could benefit society in a positive way, while the risks could be minimized by informing security officials about potential devices, enabling them to anticipate and neutralize problems. Keep on reading...

Who is up For Seeing a Really Big Snake? (video)

'Medusa' the super-sized python eyes world record.

Going 80.3 mph on compressed air

Toyota has built the fasted vehicle with a compressed air engine.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Toyota Industries intends to apply for a Guiness World record for the fastest car driven by a compressed-air engine, after its Ku:Rin, as the vehicle is called, reached 129.2km/h (80.3 mph)on a test run earlier this month. This is a three-wheel, one-seater vehicle that broke the speed record for compressed air-powered vehicles at the Japan Automobile Research Institute test facility.

The Ku:Rin is yet another attempt to explore environmentally friendly modes of transport. The tank was filled using a conventional air-conditioner compressor manufactured by Toyota.

The car was developed at the company’s Dream Car Workshop, where its engineers made use of the principle of compressed air, which Toyota knows more than a little about. The company is recognized for its expertise in compressors that are part of air conditioners. Toyota turns out about 20 million compressors for car air-conditioners per year; the company is the world's largest supplier of car air- conditioner compressors, in addition to making automobiles, engines and electronics components.

Video clips reconstructed from brain images

Science is one step closer to reading our minds.

Small aquariums make fish mean?

  

flickr

A new study casts doubt on the welfare of pet fish.

ScienceDaily — An angry glare from the family goldfish might not be the result of a missed meal, but a too-humble abode. Fish in a cramped, barren space turn mean, a study from Case Western Reserve University has found. Ornamental fishes across the U.S. might be at risk, all 182.9 million of them.

"The welfare of aquarium fishes may not seem important, but with that many of them in captivity, they become a big deal," said Ronald Oldfield, an instructor of biology at Case Western Reserve. Why, then, has the welfare of pet fishes been overlooked among the scientific community?

Oldfield is the first to scientifically study how the environment of home aquariums affects the aggressive behavior of ornamental fishes. The results are published in the online Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, volume 14, issue 4.

Oldfield compared the behavior of Midas cichlids (Amphilophus citrinellus) in a variety of environments: within their native range in a crater lake in Nicaragua, in a large artificial stream in a zoo, and in small tanks of the sizes typically used to by pet owners.

The study focused on juvenile fish to remove aggressive behavior related to mating. Also, resources such as food and shelter were removed prior to observation to eliminate direct competition. Keep on reading...

Video: Best in Show from Military Tech

Exclusive footage of the best new military technology from the DSEi Military Tech Show.

Subatomic particles caught speeding?

CERN scientists think they have clocked neutrinos going faster than the speed of light? Is this an error or will 100 years of Physics be upended?

(BBC)- Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.

Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.

A report will soon be online to draw closer scrutiny to a result that, if true, would upend a century of physics.

In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.

"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.

"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinize this.'" Keep on reading...

Can men really tell if women are close to ovulation by the sound of their voice?

Can men really tell if women are close to ovulation by the sound of their voice? There are slight changes, but they are difficult to distinguish.

(Medical Press)- The voice can reveal a lot about a person - their sex, their age, how they are feeling - and recent studies have even suggested that women's voices might also contain cues that men can read about how close they are to ovulation. A new study, however, published today in the journal PLoS ONE, challenges the view that women broadcast reproductive information in their voice.

Previous studies in this area have typically relied on the comparison of voices recorded in just two phases in the cycle: high conception risk vs. low conception risk. This new work, on the other hand, looked at variation in the voice throughout the entire menstrual cycle – a crucial step to evaluate the potential information contained in any observed voice changes.

Their results showed that the overall variation in women's vocal quality throughout the whole cycle precludes unequivocal identification of the period with the highest conception risk. Specifically, while they found that the women studied spoke with the highest tone (suggested by previous studies to be associated with attractiveness) just prior to ovulation, the tone rose again to levels indistinguishable from pre-ovulation shortly after ovulation, making it a very poor mating clue... Keep on reading.

Good News: FEMA is Prepared In Case Plunging Satellite Hits You in the Head

Emergency agency readies for 6.5-ton piece of space debris to hit Earth. The impact is expected sometime Friday.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- A dead 6-ton satellite is getting closer and closer, and is expected to smack down on Earth on Friday.

NASA's old research satellite is expected to come crashing down through the atmosphere Friday afternoon, Eastern Time. The spacecraft will not be passing over North America then, the space agency said in a statement Wednesday evening.

The predictions should become more precise by Thursday afternoon and certainly by Friday.

"It is still too early to predict the time and location of re-entry with any more certainty," NASA said.

An estimated 26 pieces - representing 1,200 pounds - are expected to survive.

FEMA Prepared In Case Plunging Satellite Hits U.S.

What is a primordial black hole made of?

A primordial black hole, surrounded by sheets of gas, dust, and stars (artist's impression).

Image courtesy NASA/ESA/ESO

Primordial black hole could be made of dark matter.

(PhysOrg.com) -- “We know that about 25% of the matter in the universe is dark matter, but we don’t know what it is,” Michael Kesden tells PhysOrg.com. “There are a number of different theories about what dark matter could be, but we think one alternative might be very small primordial black holes.”

When many of us think about black holes, we think of a huge cosmic event, sucking in everything around it. However, there is also the possibility of small black holes. “Einstein’s theory of relativity allows for black holes,” Kesden, a theoretical physicist at New York University, explains, “but doesn’t stipulate a size. It’s very possible that the early universe produced very small black holes. These would gravitate like massive black holes, floating through the universe and clustering.”

Kesden worked with Shravan Hanasoge, from Princeton University and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, to work out method of using solar oscillations to determine whether a small, primordial black hole passed through a star. If the data can show that these small black holes formed near the beginning of the universe do exist, they might make good candidates for dark matter. Their work can be seen in Physical Review Letters: “Transient Solar Oscillations Driven by Primordial Black Holes.”

“Our approach is to consider what happens if you have dark matter made of primordial black holes passing through the sun,” Kesden says. “It’s been thought of before, but no one has actually done the calculations that we have.”

Kesden explains that the sun creates energy from the nuclear fusion at its center: “There is a balance between the outward pressure gradient due to the energy released by fusion and the inward force of gravity. If the sun, or any star, is perturbed it would shake a little.”

“A small, primordial black hole would be the size of an atom but have the mass of an asteroid,” he points out...Keep on reading

Coming Soon: Robotic Fish

Robotic fish developed by MSU will be used to study the environment.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at Michigan State University are designing and studying robotic fish to be made to swim in schools in order to monitor environmental signs such as accumulations of algae and oil spills. Through the use of sensors and wireless capabilities, the fish can travel in water to collect information. But why go to all that trouble to simulate real fish if other underwater devices can be deployed for the same purpose?

Researchers working with fish robotics say that fish are worthy of simulation as they behave in ways that underwater devices cannot match. Fish are remarkably energy efficient. They have superior agility and speed when changing direction and maneuvering.

What's more, robotic fish can be told their destination and they can guide themselves from that point on, unlike remotely operated devices that need continuous commands: Speed up, go right, go left.

The robotic fish under development at MSU were demonstrated at a recent three-day event at BEACON event. BEACON is a National Science Foundation-funded center for the study of evolution, headquartered at Michigan State University with partner institutions at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Washington, North Carolina A&T State University, and the University of Idaho. Viewers watched as a robotic fish swam in an aquarium at MSU.

Cool Video: Rocket Scientists Create Futuristic Vehicle

 You are going to want one of these.

Rocket Scientists Create Futuristic Vehicle (video)

Latest attempt to explain why it isn't getting warmer: Global warming is hiding in the oceans

 

Credit: NASA

The temperature graph has flattened out since the late 1990's, while CO2 continues to rise. The latest attempt to explain this anomaly is that global warming is being absorbed by the oceans.

ScienceDaily — The planet's deep oceans at times may absorb enough heat to flatten the rate of global warming for periods of as long as a decade even in the midst of longer-term warming, according to a new analysis led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

The study, based on computer simulations of global climate, points to ocean layers deeper than 1,000 feet (300 meters) as the main location of the "missing heat" during periods such as the past decade when global air temperatures showed little trend. The findings also suggest that several more intervals like this can be expected over the next century, even as the trend toward overall warming continues.

"We will see global warming go through hiatus periods in the future," says NCAR's Gerald Meehl, lead author of the study. "However, these periods would likely last only about a decade or so, and warming would then resume. This study illustrates one reason why global temperatures do not simply rise in a straight line."

The research, by scientists at NCAR and the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia, is published online in Nature Climate Change. Funding for the study came from the National Science Foundation, NCAR's sponsor, and the Department of Energy.

Volcano that created "Year without a summer" after last eruption is rumbling again

Tambora last erupted in 1815. It left a left a crater 11 miles wide and darkened skies around the globe.

MOUNT TAMBORA, Indonesia (AP) — Bold farmers in Indonesia routinely ignore orders to evacuate the slopes of live volcanoes, but those living on Tambora took no chances when history's deadliest mountain rumbled ominously this month.

Villagers like Hasanuddin Sanusi have heard since they were young how the mountain they call home once blew apart in the largest eruption ever recorded — an 1815 event widely forgotten outside their region — killing 90,000 people and blackening skies on the other side of the globe.

So, the 45-year-old farmer didn't wait to hear what experts had to say when Mount Tambora started being rocked by a steady stream of quakes. He grabbed his wife and four young children, packed his belongings and raced down its quivering slopes...

The April 1815 eruption of Tambora left a crater 11 kilometers (7 miles) wide and 1 kilometer (half a mile) deep, spewing an estimated 400 million tons of sulfuric gases into the atmosphere and leading to "the year without summer" in the U.S. and Europe.

It was 10 times more powerful than Indonesia's much better-known Krakatoa blast of 1883 — history's second deadliest. But it doesn't share the same international renown, because the only way news spread across the oceans at the time was by slowboat, said Tambora researcher Indyo Pratomo.

Canada-based company to debut its "HTML5 operating system"

The Carbyn operating system is completely online and app based. This may revolutionize the way many devices are marketed.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A Canada-based startup founded in November 2010 arrived at TechCrunch Disrupt last week to debut its "HTML5 operating system" called Carbyn. To get this system, there is nothing to install; you use your browser and you log in to Carbyn and you're on your way. Beyond being an app, beyond being a web store, it is described by its founders as an operating system that happens to be app-focused. "It means you can get it on any device, they add, and "it means buying the cheapest tablet that gets you online so that you can get everything you want through your browser."

Jaafer Haidar and Jason Miller of Carbyn, whose mantra is "Go ahead. Just operate," showed their creation, featuring a cross-platform experience, using both the Apple iPad and Blackberry Playbook in the Disrupt show demo. Smartphone functionalty is planned some time in the future.

Carbyn enables consumers to get all the apps they enjoy in one destination, on any device, whether iPad, Blackberry Playbook, Android or others. For companies developing HTML5 applications, Carbyn is aiming to provide a wide-reaching distribution platform, according to Haidar, CEO and co-founder.

As for apps, once you have Carbyn, you are able to pin any app to the main screen. You get a familiar-looking panel of available applications. Existing HTML5 apps are easily portable to the Carbyn system, in less than half an hour, according to Carbyn, and specialist apps can be created from scratch from a custom SDK.

Video: New 'Chameleon' Tank

This new "Chameleon" tank is reportedly invisible to infrared.

Invisible tanks seem far-fetched? Not anymore. At least not to adversaries using infrared to see. Adaptiv -- an armor encasing that looks and feels as one imagines a dragon's scales to -- turns tanks into chameleons, allowing them to disappear into the environment behind them or to even look like a snow drift, trash can, crowd, or a soccer mom’s station wagon. A product of BAE working alongside the Swedish Defence Material Administration, Adaptiv flaunts the very latest in camouflage technology -- and FoxNews.com was given an exclusive look at the technology at the biannual 2011 Defense and Security Equipment International (DESi) conference, the world's largest weapons show, where it's on display for the first time.

Research team develops laser to detect roadside bombs

Lasers that could detect roadside bombs could be a lifesaver for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

ScienceDaily— A research team at Michigan State University has developed a laser that could detect roadside bombs -- the deadliest enemy weapon encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The laser, which has comparable output to a simple presentation pointer, potentially has the sensitivity and selectivity to canvas large areas and detect improvised explosive devices -- weapons that account for around 60 percent of coalition soldiers' deaths. Marcos Dantus, chemistry professor and founder of BioPhotonic Solutions, led the team and has published the results in the current issue of Applied Physics Letters.

The detection of IEDs in the field is extremely important and challenging because the environment introduces a large number of chemical compounds that mask the select few molecules that one is trying to detect, Dantus said.

"Having molecular structure sensitivity is critical for identifying explosives and avoiding unnecessary evacuation of buildings and closing roads due to false alarms," he said.

Video: Touchable 3D Character Projected Into a Real Environment

 Is this the next step in gaming?

Touchable 3D Character Projected Into a Real Environment

Do not look up. There may be a 6 ton satellite headed your way.

ASA Marshall Space Center/Rex Features

NASA's 6-ton UARS satellite will crash randomly to Earth by next weekend. The satellite has ran out of gas and can't be maneuvered for a controlled crash-down. The good news is it will break up into 26 separate components that may only weigh a fer hundred pounds. There is a 1 in 3200 chance of someone getting hit.

A nearly 6-ton satellite is heading toward Earth and could crash into the planet as early as Sept. 23, NASA officials said.

The UARS -- short for Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite -- has been in orbit since the space shuttle Discovery launched it in 1991, but it's gradually coming closer and closer to the ground as it encounters friction from the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

NASA officials told ABC News overnight that they won't know where the satellite will hit until two hours before it enters the Earth's atmosphere, moving at 5 mph.

The chances of anyone getting hit by the UARS satellite are 1 in 3,200, NASA said.

The "productive science life" of the satellite ended in 2005 when it ran out of fuel, according to NASA's website. That fuel could have been used by the satellite to ditch itself in the Pacific.

The satellite will break into pieces as it crashes toward Earth but not all of it will burn up. Scientists have identified 26 separate components that will likely survive with the debris, spreading out over 400 to 500 miles. Engineers say 1,200 pounds of metal chunks could make it down to the surface.

Cool Video: How to make a light bulb from a bottle of water

 Necessity is the mother of invention in poor countries. A man has figured out how to make a light bulb out of a bottle of water. (video)

Mini robots entered in Hawaii triathlon by Panasonic

Is this a cheap publicity stunt or a useful scientific project?

TOKYO — A trio of small Japanese robots will be working together in the Ironman triathlon race in Hawaii next month in a show of their inner strength -- rechargeable batteries.

Consumer electronics maker Panasonic will use one set of three rechargeable batteries for the whole 2.4-mile (3.8-kilometre) swim, 112-mile bike ride and 26.2-mile run to power the humanoid "Evolta" robots made by creator Tomotaka Takahashi.

Panasonic hopes to reach the finish line in one week, or 168 hours, by recharging the set of batteries shared by the three robots as many times as necessary during the race.

Video: Strange Lights in the Sky Over the South Western United States 9-15-2011

What is it? (video)


ufo, video,

A Planet That Orbits Two Stars

NASA's Kepler has confirmed the first planet that orbiting two stars.

ScienceDaily — The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA's Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet -- a planet orbiting two stars -- 200 light-years from Earth.

Unlike Star Wars' Tatooine, the planet is cold, gaseous and not thought to harbor life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy. Previous research has hinted at the existence of circumbinary planets, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Kepler detected such a planet, known as Kepler-16b, by observing transits, where the brightness of a parent star dims from the planet crossing in front of it.

"This discovery confirms a new class of planetary systems that could harbor life," Kepler Principal Investigator William Borucki, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said. "Given that most stars in our galaxy are part of a binary system, this means the opportunities for life are much broader than if planets form only around single stars. This milestone discovery confirms a theory that scientists have had for decades but could not prove until now."

Going to school at 320 MPH (Video)

Cool Video: Jet-powered school bus hits full throttle at 320 mph

Apple Yanks Smartphone Manufacturing Game From App Store

Apparently, Apple does not want you playing games about "the horrible human and environmental costs of smartphone manufacturing."

(MSNBC)- It seems there's a smartphone game about smartphone manufacturing that one of the most famous smartphone makers doesn't want you to play.

The game app — called "Phone Story" — was available in Apple's App Store for a few days before Apple yanked it from its virtual shelves on Tuesday.

Created by indie developers Molleindustria, "Phone Story" is a collection of four mini games designed to show the horrible human and environmental costs of smartphone manufacturing and sales.

Laziness pays off for small mammals?

There appears to be a link between hibernation and longevity.

Small furry mammals partial to a daily dose of hibernation in winter are probably extending their lifespan at the same time, according to a study published Wednesday.

Experiments with Djugarian hamsters native to Siberia showed that when the tiny rodents temporarily lower their metabolism and body temperatures, a state called torpor, it stops and even reverses a natural breakdown of chromosomes linked to ageing.

Previous studies had hinted at a causal link between hibernation and longevity, but this is the first one to show the biological mechanism that may account for it.

In the laboratory, researchers led by Christopher Turbill of the Institute for Wildlife Ecology in Vienna created an artificial environment for 25 adult virgin female hamsters, offering only eight hours of light per day.

The faux-winter conditions were designed to trigger a hibernation response, according to the study, published Wednesday by the British Royal Society in the journal Biology Letters.

Video: Pod of majestic blue whales off California

Rare Sight off California Coast


whales, California, video,

When you die, who owns your Facebook?

When you die, who owns your Facebook? The answer isn't clear because the law is vague. Undoubtedly, courts will be forced to address this question in the future.

When you die, does your Facebook account die with you? Or that online photo album? What about your iTunes playlist, blogs or tweets?

Laws in the United States and elsewhere are vague on the fate of digital rights to online accounts after death, leading to complications and legal wrangling for survivors who want access to the online services of the deceased.

Legal experts say it's unclear who owns what in the Internet "cloud," and that in some cases the user agreement for email or social networking sites terminates when a person dies.

In the case of online photo albums, "those photos are yours and you have a copyright, but the problem is if you upload them to a site like Shutterfly, the property you own is now stuck behind a license," said Nathan Dosch, a Wisconsin attorney specializing in estate planning.

"The underlying asset is still owned by you but the access terminates on your death. The same can be said about emails."

Gerry Beyer, a professor at Texas Tech University School of Law, said the definition of "digital assets" remains subject to interpretation. A key issue is whether what is in the online accounts is "property" with any value.

This leaves open a great potential for litigation, he said.

50 New Exoplanets Found

This find of 50 new exoplanets includes 16 super-Earths.

ScienceDaily — The HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile is the world's most successful planet finder [1]. The HARPS team, led by Michel Mayor (University of Geneva, Switzerland), have announced the discovery of more than 50 new exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, including sixteen super-Earths [2]. This is the largest number of such planets ever announced at one time [3]. The new findings are being presented at a conference on Extreme Solar Systems where 350 exoplanet experts are meeting in Wyoming, USA.

"The harvest of discoveries from HARPS has exceeded all expectations and includes an exceptionally rich population of super-Earths and Neptune-type planets hosted by stars very similar to our Sun. And even better -- the new results show that the pace of discovery is accelerating," says Mayor.

In the eight years since it started surveying stars like the Sun using the radial velocity technique HARPS has been used to discover more than 150 new planets. About two thirds of all the known exoplanets with masses less than that of Neptune [4] were discovered by HARPS. These exceptional results are the fruit of several hundred nights of HARPS observations [5].

Using feline AIDS to illuminate ways to combat human HIV/AIDS

Can glowing cats help in the fight against HIV/AIDS?

(MedicalXpress)- Mayo Clinic researchers have developed a genome-based immunization strategy to fight feline AIDS and illuminate ways to combat human HIV/AIDS and other diseases. The goal is to create cats with intrinsic immunity to the feline AIDS virus. The findings -- called fascinating and landmark by one reviewer -- appear in the current online issue of Nature Methods.

Feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) causes AIDS in cats as the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) does in people: by depleting the body's infection-fighting T-cells. The feline and human versions of key proteins that potently defend mammals against virus invasion -- termed restriction factors -- are ineffective against FIV and HIV respectively. The Mayo team of physicians, virologists, veterinarians and gene therapy researchers, along with collaborators in Japan, sought to mimic the way evolution normally gives rise over vast time spans to protective protein versions. They devised a way to insert effective monkey versions of them into the cat genome.

"One of the best things about this biomedical research is that it is aimed at benefiting both human and feline health," says Eric Poeschla, M.D., Mayo molecular biologist and leader of the international study. "It can help cats as much as people."

Mutant popping madness!

"Rage" is mutant popping madness!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Prepare for a perfect allergy storm this fall

This fall may be the worst allergy season ever. Conditions are set for a perfect allergy storm. This is really bad news for allergy suffers everywhere.

NEW YORK (WLS) - With record pollen counts already on the board for August, this fall is gearing up to be one of the worst, and longest, allergy seasons yet, according to experts.

Thanks to a particularly wet summer, ragweed pollen levels are surging and standing water left over from summer flooding and Hurricane Irene has increased the amount of mold, a common year-round allergen, in the air.

"We're going to have an allergy double whammy," says Dr. Clifford Bassett, medical director of Allergy and Asthma Care of New York.

To top it all off, the allergy season is expected to last a few weeks longer than usual this year, according to research published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While spring allergies usually come from pollen from trees and grass, fall allergies are caused almost exclusively by ragweed pollen. The season usually runs from mid-August until the first frost of the year, around early October, but if the frost is delayed, as is predicted for this year, the allergy season goes on indefinitely until it comes.

News You Can Use: Boost Your WiFI Signal With An Empty Beer Can

Complete instructions are here.

Symphony of Science - the Quantum World!

Turn up the volume for this musical exploration of the Quantum World. Enjoy!

Ink Pens Designed to be Used as a Weapon (video)

Should an ink pen be considered a deadly weapon? This ink pen (Tuffwriter) might qualify. Just watch the videos.

Sunday Night Will Unveil September's Full Harvest Moon

Credit: stardust

A harvest moon will be in the sky this weekend!

Earth's only satellite will appear big and bright on Sunday night and early Monday morning when September's full moon enters the night sky.

September's full moon is also known as the Harvest Moon, because its low-hanging light in the southeastern sky would have traditionally given farmers extra illumination by which to harvest their crops.
This month, the moon will appear at its largest at 5:27 a.m. EDT on Monday, Sept. 12.

Who is up for blood swimming microspiders?

Before you have arachnophobic nightmares, these microspiders are for helping the body heal.

(New Scientist)- A new spider-like micromachine could swim through a person's blood vessels, healing damaged areas and delivering drugs as it goes.

Ayusman Sen of Pennsylvania State University in University Park and his colleagues have created the self-propelling microspiders using spheres less than a micrometre wide. Each sphere is made up of two halves – one hemisphere is gold, the other silica – and looks like a gold-and-silver Christmas bauble.

To turn the spheres into motors, the group attached a Grubbs catalyst – a molecule that builds long chains of smaller molecules – to the silica side. When Sen drops his spheres into a solvent containing the chemical norbornene, the catalyst spins a polymer from molecules of the chemical. Eventually there are far more unpolymerised single molecules of norbornene around the gold side of the sphere than the silica side , creating an osmotic gradient, as fluids will always move from a region with lots of particles to a region with fewer particles. The solvent rushes toward the gold side of the sphere, causing the whole sphere to move.

Birth Control Pills Change Memory

Birth control pills affect memory. that offers some scary possibilities.

ScienceDaily — Women who use contraceptives like birth control pills experience memory changes, according to new UC Irvine research. Their ability to remember the gist of an emotional event improves, while women not using the contraceptives better retain details.

"What's most exciting about this study is that it shows the use of hormonal contraception alters memory," UCI graduate researcher Shawn Nielsen said. "There are only a handful of studies examining the cognitive effects of the pill, and more than 100 million women use it worldwide."

She stressed that the medications did not damage memory. "It's a change in the type of information they remember, not a deficit."

The change makes sense, said Nielsen, who works with neurobiologist Larry Cahill, because contraceptives suppress sex hormones such as estrogen and progesterone to prevent pregnancy. Those hormones were previously linked to women's strong "left brain" memory by Cahill's research group.

"This new finding may be surprising to some, but it's a natural outgrowth of the research we've been doing on sex differences for 10 years," Cahill said.

Zoologist in China discovers musical frog

Raw video: Rare amphibian whose croak sounds like the plucking of a musical instrument discovered by zoologist in China.

Anyone up for an invisible exo-planet?

An artist's interpretation of the Kepler observatory in space.
CREDIT: NASA.

NASA's Kepler spacecraft has spotted a planet that is being 'tugged on' by an invisible exo-planet.

ScienceDaily — Usually, running five minutes late is a bad thing since you might lose your dinner reservation or miss out on tickets to the latest show. But when a planet runs five minutes late, astronomers get excited because it suggests that another world is nearby.

NASA's Kepler spacecraft has spotted a planet that alternately runs late and early in its orbit because a second, "invisible" world is tugging on it. This is the first definite detection of a previously unknown planet using this method. No other technique could have found the unseen companion.

"This invisible planet makes itself known by its influence on the planet we can see," said astronomer Sarah Ballard of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Ballard is lead author on the study, which has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

"It's like having someone play a prank on you by ringing your doorbell and running away. You know someone was there, even if you don't see them when you get outside," she added.

Both the seen and unseen worlds orbit the Sun-like star Kepler-19, which is located 650 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. The 12th-magnitude star is well placed for viewing by backyard telescopes on September evenings.

Video of giant crocodile captured alive in Philippines

How would you like to go face-to-face with a 21-foot crocodile? This video shows a giant 21-foot crocodile weighing in at about a ton that was caught by a group of villagers in the Philippines.

Did the Earth Once Have Two Moons?

A new paper makes the claim Earth once has two moons.

(PhysOrg.com) -- As early as Sept. 8th, NASA's GRAIL mission will blast off to uncover some of the mysteries beneath the surface of the Moon. That cratered gray exterior hides some tantalizing things – even, perhaps, a long-lost companion.

If a paper published recently in the journal Nature* is right, two moons once graced our night skies. The proposition has not been proven, but has drawn widespread attention.
"It's an intriguing idea," says David Smith, GRAIL deputy principal investigator at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "And it would be a way to explain one of the great perplexities of the Earth-Moon system – the Moon's strangely asymmetrical nature. Its near and far sides are substantially different."

The Moon's near side, facing us, is dominated by vast smooth 'seas' of ancient hardened lava. In contrast, the far side is marked by mountainous highlands. Researchers have long struggled to account for the differences, and the "two moon" theory introduced by Martin Jutzi and Erik Asphaug of the University of California at Santa Cruz is the latest attempt.

Scientists agree that when a Mars-sized object crashed into our planet about 4 billion years ago, the resulting debris cloud coalesced to form the Moon. Jutzi and Asphaug posit that the debris cloud actually formed two moons. A second, smaller chunk of debris landed in just the right orbit to lead or follow the bigger Moon around Earth.

"Normally, such moons accrete into a single body shortly after formation," explains Smith. "But the new theory proposes that the second moon ended up at one of the Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system."

Lagrange points are a bit like gravitational fly traps. They can hold an object for a long time--but not necessarily forever. The second moon eventually worked its way out and collided with its bigger sister. The collision occurred at such a low velocity that the impact did not form a crater. Instead, the smaller moon 'went splat,' forming the contemporary far side highlands.

In short, the lunar highlands are the lost moon's remains.

Astronaut Footsteps Seen on Moon by NASA Orbiter

Apollo 17 landing site. Credit: NASA

New research shows thousands of stars may explode as supernovae

Keplers supernova.jpg

Some old stars, white dwarfs, might be held up by their rapid spins and explode as they slow down.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In the Hollywood blockbuster "Speed," a bomb on a bus is rigged to blow up if the bus slows down below 50 miles per hour. The premise - slow down and you explode - makes for a great action movie plot, and also happens to have a cosmic equivalent.

New research shows that some old stars might be held up by their rapid spins, and when they slow down, they explode as supernovae. Thousands of these "time bombs" could be scattered throughout our Galaxy.

"We haven't found one of these 'time bomb' stars yet in the Milky Way, but this research suggests that we've been looking for the wrong signs. Our work points to a new way of searching for supernova precursors," said astrophysicist Rosanne Di Stefano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

The specific type of stellar explosion Di Stefano and her colleagues studied is called a Type Ia supernova. It occurs when an old, compact star known as a white dwarf destabilizes.

A white dwarf is a stellar remnant that has ceased nuclear fusion. It typically can weigh up to 1.4 times as much as our Sun - a figure called the Chandrasekhar mass after the astronomer who first calculated it. Any heavier, and gravity overwhelms the forces supporting the white dwarf, compacting it and igniting runaway nuclear fusion that blows the star apart.

There are two possible ways for a white dwarf to exceed the Chandrasekhar mass and explode as a Type Ia supernova. It can accrete gas from a donor star, or two white dwarfs can collide. Most astronomers favor the first scenario as the more likely explanation. But we would expect to see certain signs if the theory is correct, and we don't for most Type Ia supernovae.

Would you see a 'Doc Bot'?

Robots allow physicians to be bedside, from a distance.

Editor of the journal Remote Sensing forced to resign for publishing climate change skeptical article

This editor is lucky Al Gore doesn't fly his private jet over to his house and thrash him.Seriously, you can rad the reaction of the paper's author Dr. Roy Spencer here. He stands by everything in the paper.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Wolfgang Wagner, editor of the journal Remote Sensing, has resigned from his post after an internal review revealed that a paper published in his journal by climatic scientists Roy Spencer and William Braswell had not been properly reviewed before publishing. Subsequently, he says a paper that was fundamentally flawed was allowed to be printed, damaging the integrity of the journal, and thus the only right thing for him to do was resign.

In addition to submitting his resignation, Wagner posted a final editorial in the journal and in it not only accepted full blame for publishing the paper and apologized for the mistake, but took the opportunity to take some shots at the media for what he says were overinflated headlines regarding the claims made by the authors in the paper. He was referring to the headlines of such mainstream media as Forbes, Fox News and others who chose to use the paper and it’s finding as a means for furthering their own interests at the expense of accurate science.

The paper caused an uproar in the scientific community when printed in July due to its assertions that computer models that predict the amount of global warming that will occur in the future are flawed and thus temperatures won’t increase as much as others have suggested.

Ancient Romans invented the fast-food hamburger

Ancient Romans invented the fast-food hamburger and other amazing facts.

Green Video Games

Video games go green and promote environmental education awareness. Is this good or environmental political correctness gone bad?

Astronomy Picture of the Day: Laser Blast Into Space

Via ABC News:

Photographer Yuri Beletsky says he shot this amazing image in 2010 at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, part of the European Southern Observatory. The bright streak is a laser beam, used to help the telescope compensate for the distorting effects of the atmosphere. Above is an image of the Milky Way. 

Click image for larger view.

(Yuri Beletsky/ESO)

Stem cells that make hair grow have been discovered

The cure for baldness is a step closer.

ScienceDaily — Yale researchers have discovered the source of signals that trigger hair growth, an insight that may lead to new treatments for baldness.

The researchers identified stem cells within the skin's fatty layer and showed that molecular signals from these cells were necessary to spur hair growth in mice, according to research published in the Sept. 2 issue of the journal Cell.

"If we can get these fat cells in the skin to talk to the dormant stem cells at the base of hair follicles, we might be able to get hair to grow again," said Valerie Horsley, assistant professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology and senior author of the paper.

Men with male pattern baldness still have stem cells in follicle roots but these stem cells lose the ability to jump-start hair regeneration. Scientists have known that these follicle stem cells need signals from within the skin to grow hair, but the source of those signals has been unclear.

Horsley's team observed that when hair dies, the layer of fat in the scalp that comprises most of the skin's thickness shrinks. When hair growth begins, the fat layer expands in a process called adipogenesis. Researchers found that a type of stem cell involved in creation of new fat cells -- adipose precursor cells -- was required for hair regeneration in mice. They also found these cells produce molecules called PDGF (platelet derived growth factors), which are necessary to produce hair growth.

Are people texting while asleep?

This is a possibly embarrassing possibility.

Desert planets might be the more common type of habitable planet in the galaxy

Picture the planet from the books and movie titled "Dune."

(PHYSORG)- Desert planets strikingly like the world depicted in the science fiction classic "Dune" might be the more common type of habitable planet in the galaxy, rather than watery planets such as Earth, researchers suggest.

Their findings also hint that Venus might have been a habitable desert world as recently as 1 billion years ago.

Nearly everywhere there is water on Earth, there is life. As such, the search for life elsewhere in the universe has largely focused on "aqua planets" with a lot of liquid water on their surfaces — either terrestrial planets largely covered with oceans, such as Earth, or theoretical "ocean planets" completely covered by a layer of water hundreds of miles deep, somewhat like thawed versions of Jupiter's moon Ganymede.

To be habitable, aqua planets must orbit their stars in a so-called "Goldilocks zone" where they are neither too hot nor too cold. If they are too far from the Sun, they freeze; if they are too close, steam builds up in their atmospheres, trapping heat that vaporizes still more water, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect that boils all the oceans off the planet, as apparently happened on Venus. Eventually, such planets get so hot, they force water vapor high enough into the atmosphere for it to get split into hydrogen and oxygen by ultraviolet light — the hydrogen then escapes into space, the oxygen likely reacts with the molten surface and gets incorporated into the mantle , and the planet's atmosphere loses all its water over time.

Instead of aqua planets with abundant water on their surfaces, researchers investigated what "land planets" might be like, ones with no oceans and vast dry deserts, but perhaps oases here and there. The planet Arrakis depicted in science fiction classic "Dune" is one exceptionally well-developed example of a habitable land planet, said planetologist Kevin Zahnle at NASA Ames Research Center. Arrakis is essentially a bigger, warmer, sparsely inhabited version of Mars with a breathable oxygen atmosphere and polar regions cool and moist enough to have small water icecaps and morning dew.

The Threat of Space Junk

Thousands of pieces of floating debris could destroy the space station.

Advanced toolmaking methods Started 300,000 years earlier than previously thought

Homo erectus was using advanced toolmaking methods in East Africa 1.8 million years ago.

ScienceDaily  — A new study suggests that Homo erectus, a precursor to modern humans, was using advanced toolmaking methods in East Africa 1.8 million years ago, at least 300,000 years earlier than previously thought. The study, recently published in Nature, raises new questions about where these tall and slender early humans originated and how they developed sophisticated tool-making technology.

Homo erectus appeared about 2 million years ago, and ranged across Asia and Africa before hitting a possible evolutionary dead-end, about 70,000 years ago. Some researchers think Homo erectus evolved in East Africa, where many of the oldest fossils have been found, but the discovery in the 1990s of equally old Homo erectus fossils in the country of Georgia has led others to suggest an Asian origin. The study in Nature does not resolve the debate but adds new complexity. At 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus in Dmanisi, Georgia was still using simple chopping tools while in West Turkana, Kenya, according to the study, the population had developed hand axes, picks and other innovative tools that anthropologists call "Acheulian."

Viral Video: Two chatbots talking to each other

 Two chatty robots talk to each other.