 California and fifteen other states are suing the US Environmental Protection Agency because want to be able to set far more stringent emission standards than advocated by the US government. The EPA wants to avoid a pathwork of environmental standards, while California says that they the proposed standards are not sufficient to address the problems they are experiencing as a result of current emission levels. |
 An international study has discovered that warmer autumn temperatures are reducing the ability of Northern forests to sequester carbon dioxide. Normally, carbon dioxide is sequestered in the spring and released in the fall, but warmer fall temperatures have increased the fall carbon dioxide release without an equivalent rate of increase in spring sequestering. As a result, Northern forests are locked in a feedback loop with global warming in which rising global temperatures make the forests less effective in countering those rising temperatures. |
| Physics Org |
| DNA used as a template for nanolithography - Adam Woolley and Héctor Becerril have developed a method to use DNA molecules as templates to define patterns on substrates. The researchers deposit metal films over DNA molecules aligned on a substrate. The DNA molecules essentially act as nanostencils to define sub-10-nm-sized patterns on the substrate. The researchers call this process “DNA shadow nanolithography” because the metal film is deposited at an angle and the shadow cast by the DNA molecules defines the dimensions of the features on the substrate. |
SPACE.com |
 Zero-G Stresses Immune Organs - Scientists conducted an experiment with mice that simulated zero-gravity on the ground and showed that a protein called osteopontin (OPN), a stress hormone connected with bone loss in space, may also be connected with the dangerous wasting of the spleen and thymus organs. Although Denhardt isn't uncertain how the process works, his team found that lifting up mice's hind legs--a stressful simulation of weightlessness--for three days caused about a 70 percent reduction in spleen and thymus tissue, compared to normal mice. The breaking down of organ tissue, called atrophy, also occurred in mice that were stressed out due to isolation. |
news@nature |
 Arsenic patent keeps drug for rare cancer out of reach of many - For thousands of years, arsenic has been known to have medicinal properties. It has been used at various times to treat syphilis and sleeping sickness, or occasionally to poison unsuspecting rats and husbands. In the past few decades, some scientists have discovered arsenic's ability to cure acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL), a rare and fatal cancer that strikes relatively young people. But despite its abundance and long history, arsenic treatment is inaccessible to all but the richest of people—because an American company holds the patent on a drug called Trisenox, a soluble form of arsenic trioxide. |
 Flying insects threaten to deafen Japan - A cicada known as the kumazemi is descending on Japan en masse, deafening the citizens and wreaking havoc on the country's fibre-optic system. From the past three years' data, the scientists calculate that this year will be the four-year peak, with nearly 2.5 times as many cicadas as in 2006. The noise level is also set to climb. Measured at 90.4 decibels at another Osaka park last year, this year the same spot is expected to hit 94 decibels. The kumazemi are also cutting households off from their Internet. Apparently mistaking fibre-optic cables for withered branches, they have been punching their one-millimetre-diameter ovipositors into the cables and laying eggs. |
Wired Science |
 Nanotech Discovery Could Lead to Spiderman Suit - A team of Italian scientists says their latest nanotech discovery is the secret to the wall-scaling Spiderman suit. Professor Nicola Pugno, an engineer and physicist at Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, has created a hierarchy of adhesive forces he claims are strong enough to suspend a person’s full body weight against a wall or on a ceiling. The adhesive is also easy to detach, according to the paper. |
 Scientists Study Out-Of-Body Experiences - Researchers in England and Switzerland have figured out ways to confuse the sensory signals received by the brain, allowing people to seem to be standing aside and watching themselves. seated volunteers were fitted with head-mounted video displays that allowed them to view themselves from behind, using a pair of video cameras, one for each eye. A researcher would stand behind them and extend a plastic rod which they could see toward the area just below the cameras. At the same time another plastic rod, which they could not see, touched their chest.The volunteers said they experienced the feeling of being behind their own body watching. Many found it "weird" and seemingly real, though not scary. |
 Fungi Make Biodiesel Efficiently at Room Temperature - Scientists at the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology have found a much better way to make biodiesel. Their new method could lower the cost and increase the energy efficiency of fuel production. Instead of mixing the ingredients and heating them for hours, the chemical engineers pass sunflower oil and methanol through a bed of pellets made from fungal spores. An enzyme produced by the fungus does the work -- making biodiesel with impressive efficiency. |
The New York Times |
 Rule to Expand Mountaintop Coal Mining - The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation on Friday that would enshrine the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal. The technique involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams. The new rule would allow the practice to continue and expand, providing only that mine operators minimize the debris and cause the least environmental harm, although those terms are not clearly defined and to some extent merely restate existing law. |
Technology Review Feed - Tech Review Top Stories |
 Two-Sided Touch Screen - Researchers at Microsoft and Mitsubishi are developing a new touch-screen system that lets people type text, click hyperlinks, and navigate maps from both the front and back of a portable device. A semitransparent image of the fingers touching the back of the device is superimposed on the front so that users can see what they're touching. |
 E-paper with Photonic Ink - Scientists in Canada have used photonic crystals to create a novel type of flexible electronic-paper display. Unlike other such devices, the photonic-crystal display is the first with pixels that can be individually tuned to any color. P-Ink works by controlling the spacing between photonic crystals, which affects the wavelengths of light they reflect. |
 Offshore platform tests bird-friendly lighting - Dutch Petrol company NAM is testing new lighting by electronics giant Philips to improve safety for migratory birds who can get disoriented by brightly-lit offshore platforms. Almost all the floodlights, some 380 lamps, have been replaced with the green coloured lights during the trial period. According to Philips birds are particularly attracted by red tones in the light and much less by blue or green tones. |
 Crushed Glass to Be Spread on Beaches - Faced with the constant challenge of keeping sand on Florida's beaches, Broward County officials are exploring an innovative option to use pulverized glass to control erosion. |
| Potato chip flavoring protects concrete - Awni Al-Otoom of the Jordan University of Science and Technology found sodium acetate -- the ingredient that helps give salt and vinegar-flavored potato chips a tangy snap -- is the key to a new waterproof coating for concrete. |
 Indians predated Newton 'discovery' by 250 years - Dr George Gheverghese Joseph from The University of Manchester says the 'Kerala School' identified the 'infinite series'- one of the basic components of calculus - in about 1350.The discovery is currently - and wrongly - attributed in books to Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz at the end of the seventeenth centuries. |
 First genome transplant changes one species into another - For the first time, scientists have completely transformed a species of bacteria into another species by transplanting its complete set of DNA. The achievement marks a significant step toward the construction of synthetic life, with applications including the production of clean fuel in as little as a decade. |
| Girls prefer pink, or at least a redder shade of blue - A study in the August 21st issue of Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press, reports some of the first conclusive evidence in support of the long-held notion that men and women differ when it comes to their favorite colors. Indeed, the researchers found that women really do prefer pink - or at least a redder shade of blue -than men do. |
 Battling bitter coffee -- chemists vs. main source of coffee bitterness - Bitter taste can ruin a cup of coffee. Now, chemists in Germany and the United States say they have identified the chemicals that appear to be largely responsible for java's bitterness, a finding that could one day lead to a better tasting brew. Using advanced chromatography techniques and a human sensory panel trained to detect coffee bitterness, Hofmann and his associates found that coffee bitterness is due to two main classes of compounds: chlorogenic acid lactones and phenylindanes, both of which are antioxidants found in roasted coffee beans. |
| Are civil unions a 600-year-old tradition? - A compelling new study from the September issue of the Journal of Modern History reviews historical evidence, including documents and gravesites, suggesting that homosexual civil unions may have existed six centuries ago in France. |
 One Species' Genome Discovered Inside Another's - Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a copy of the genome of a bacterial parasite residing inside the genome of its host species. The research, reported in today's Science, also shows that lateral gene transfer - the movement of genes between unrelated species - may happen much more frequently between bacteria and multicellular organisms than scientists previously believed, posing dramatic implications for evolution. |
| Battle of the Sexes: Study Reveals Married Men Lag Behind in Household Chores - Based on data from more than 17,000 respondents in 28 countries, researchers found that live-in boyfriends perform more housework than married men because cohabiting couples tend to split housework more evenly than married couples. After marriage, however, women take on a larger portion of household chores. Most studies of housework suggest that on average married women do about twice as much housework as their husbands even after controlling for employment status and other factors. |
 Satellite images show destroyed and threatened villages in Darfur - A pioneering AAAS program that provides technical expertise to human rights groups is helping Amnesty International USA with a new online effort to monitor threatened settlements in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan and provide evidence of destroyed villages. |
| HiRISE releases 1,200 images, launches viewer tool on Web site - Anyone connected by Internet can now see planet Mars better than at any time in history, through the eye of HiRISE, the most powerful camera ever to orbit another planet. |
 New View of Doomed Star - Eta Carinae is a mysterious, extremely bright and unstable star located a mere stone's throw - astronomically speaking - from Earth at a distance of only about 7500 light years. The star is thought to be consuming its nuclear fuel at an incredible rate, while quickly drawing closer to its ultimate explosive demise. |
| Could Some Win With Global Warming? - Northern homes could save on heating fuel. Rust Belt cities might stop losing snowbirds to the South. Canadian farmers could harvest bumper crops. Greenland may become awash in cod and oil riches. Shippers could count on an Arctic shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific. Forests may expand. Mongolia could see a go-go economy. This is all speculative, even a little facetious, and any gains are not likely to make up for predicted frightening upheavals elsewhere. But still ... might there be a silver lining for the frigid regions of Canada and Russia? |
| Boring Star May Mean Livelier Planet, Astronomer Says - "Boring" light from red dwarf star Gliese 581 means better odds for extraterrestrial life in that planetary system, according to University of British Columbia astronomer Jaymie Matthews. |
| 7M Pounds of Trash Pulled From Waterways - Smokers are littering shorelines and waterways worldwide with millions of cigarettes, and their filters topped the list of trash items culled during last year's annual international coastal cleanup, according to a new report. |
 ESA presents the sharpest ever satellite map of Earth - The most detailed portraits ever of the Earth's land surface have been created with ESA's Envisat environmental satellite. The portraits are the first products produced as part of the ESA-initiated GlobCover project and are available online. |
Source: The Independent  An interesting article sent to me by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small} ancalagon_tb. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is a growing problem in the US which has recently spread to Europe. This occurs when all the bees in a colony suddenly abandon the hive and its queen. The bees and the hive, understandably, perish. More than 60 percent of the commercial bee population on the west coast of the US has been lost to this disorder, and the problem affects more than just honey production: bees are responsible for pollinating crops so substantial bee population loses can translate into crop failures. Many theories have been put forward, but one of the more recent is that cell phones interfere with the bees' ability to navigate. One preliminary study determined that bees refused to return to a hive when a cell phone has been placed in close proximity to it. An earlier study had already determined that bees change their behaviour around power lines. The jury is still out as the to true cause. |
Source: New York Magazine  Another article sent to me by ancalagon_tb. A Columbia professor has an interesting proposal for both increasing the availability of fresh produce in the city and combat global warming. He proposes building 30 story "vertical greenhouses" to raise fruits and vegetables, as well as generate energy cleanly. The system could also be used to purify wastewater, allowing the city to conserve water resources. The system would reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere if, for each building completed, an equivalent amount of farmland was covered with trees. |
Source: PhysOrg  You can't get a runner much more dedicated than this. Suni Williams, currently serving on board the International Space Station, ran the Boston Marathon while orbiting 210 miles above the Earth. She circled the Earth twice in the 4 hours and 24 minutes it took her to complete the race. |
Source: Technology Review  Recent advances may give sight to congenitally blind people. The approach is based on research that visual sensations can be generated in blind individuals by electrically stimulating the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) which is located between the optic nerve and the visual cortex. The LGN is one of the first "routing stations" along the visual pathway so visual information that reaches this point has been minimally processed. This means that it is easier to correlate parts of the visual field with parts of the LGN. The only drawback is that the LGN is located deep within the brain so is difficult to access. Recall, though, that in an earlier post that there have been recent advances in using lasers to stimulate and suppress individual neurons. |
Source: Technology Review  Scientists have used brain imaging to detect the differences in neural behaviour between psychopaths and non-psychopaths. Non-psychopaths who were shown horrific images displayed significant activity in the amygdala; however psychopaths displayed little or no activity. They theorize that psychopaths may lack the neural wiring "...to generate the basic emotions that keep primitive killer instincts in check." Don't expect to see a "test" for psychopaths soon; the lack of activation in response to such images may also be important to those in more "heroic" professions such as police officers and firefighters. Moreover, non-psychopaths can also become killers so detecting potential psychopaths would not end acts of mass violence. |
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