Arctic Ice on Track for Another All-Time Low (1)
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The Northwest Passage is about to be ice-free for the second year in the row, as seen on satellite images released today by the European Space Agency. The less direct Amundsen Northwest Passage has already been passable for about a month. Last September scientists were very concerned when the Arctic ice pack shrunk to its smallest size since satellite measurements began almost 30 years ago. This year the ice has already claimed the title of ...
Go Green By Having Fewer Kids (2)
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If you really want to go green, advised a recent British Medical Journal editorial, then help the population-booming developing world have fewer kids. It's interesting advice, but I'm somewhat ambivalent about the editors' focus on making contraceptives universally available. When countries prosper, birth rates fall: this is a well-known, global trend. The reasons are many, and certainly involve access to contraceptives -- but there are economic reasons, too. In developed countries, children aren't seen as ...
Tropical Storm Gustav Threatens U.S. Energy Infrastructure (3)
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UPDATE (8:35 AM Pacific): Tropical storm Gustav continues to track towards the Gulf's energy infrastructure and with an intensity that suggests it will become a category-3 hurricane with sustained winds of 115 miles per hour, according to a National Hurricane Center update issued this morning. The storm's most likely path is now slightly to the west of New Orleans as seen in the updated picture above. Three days before the three-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's ...
Tropical Storm Gustav Threatens U.S. Energy Infrastructure (1)
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UPDATE (8:35 AM Pacific): Tropical storm Gustav continues to track towards the Gulf's energy infrastructure and with an intensity that suggests it will become a category-3 hurricane with sustained winds of 115 miles per hour, according to a National Hurricane Center update issued this morning. The storm's most likely path is now slightly to the west of New Orleans as seen in the updated picture above. Three days before the three-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's ...
Rubber Hand Trick Reveals Brain-Body Link (2)
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The rubber hand illusion is more than a vaguely creepy parlor trick. It's a window into relationship between our mental and physical self-conception. During the illusion, a participant's hand is hidden, and a rubber hand positioned so that it appears as her own. She knows that it's fake -- but when both hands are stroked simultaneously, what's seen and felt becomes blurred. Suddenly the rubber hand literally feels like it belongs to her. Consciously she ...
The Digg Science Review (2)
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Like it or not, what gets made popular on the social media site Digg influences what young males between the ages of 16 and 30 know about science. There's plenty of smart, timely, interesting science news on the site, but much of the linked content is recycled, lame, or downright wrong. So, your friendly Wired Science contributors, Brandon Keim and myself, created this weekly series, The Digg Science Review, to help you parse the headlines ...
Bacteria Sacrifice Selves for Greater Good (3)
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Like American soldiers on the shores of Normandy during World War II, salmonella bacteria sacrifice themselves for the greater good -- a phenomenon that may illuminate the evolution of altruism. When salmonella enter the digestive tract, they fare poorly: other bacteria have already established their positions. But by sending an advance group digging into intestinal tissues, they set off an inflammatory reaction in their host, sweeping away the other bacteria. The advance group also dies, ...
NASA/ATK Rocket Destroyed Shortly After Launch (1)
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At 5:10 a.m. ET this morning a developmental ATK ALV X-1 suborbital rocket carrying two NASA hypersonic experiments exploded off the coast of Virginia after being launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. Range Safety made the call to destroy the rocket 27 seconds into the flight. Rockets are equipped with self destruct mechanism to protect the public from misfiring or misguided rockets. No damage or injuries have been reported, but the cause of the problem ...
Jamaican Sprinting Dominance Isn't Genetic (2)
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With Jamaica's sprinters dominating at the Beijing Olympics, it was probably inevitable that someone would wonder if Jamaicans aren't genetically predisposed to run fast. Out come the preliminary findings: 70 percent of Jamaicans appear to have ACTN3, a gene that codes for fast-twitch muscle fiber, ostensibly making them better short-distance runners. But if sprinting dominance tracks with racial genetics, why didn't Jamaica do better in the 2004 Olympics in Athens, where their men won just ...
Scientists Make a Fat-Burning Fat (10)
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Green depicts cells with inactivated PRDM16; red, a muscle protein is expressed; all nuclei, including those of brown fat cells, are blue. What if fat could make you lose weight? So suggests research into a little-known type of adipose tissue called brown fat. Though it's commonly thought that fat -- beyond the bit necessary for insulation and spare energy -- is unequivocally bad, there are actually two types: white and brown. White fat is the ...
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/07/san-andreas-run.html (2)
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The San Andreas fault is longer than thought, say geologists. Satellite images show that mud pots and miniature volcanoes in the southeastern part of California's Imperial County are not randomly scattered, but arranged in a linear pattern -- a telltale sign of a tectonic rift beneath. In a paper published today in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, researchers from the United States Geological Survey suggest that the rift belongs to the San ...
San Andreas Fault Runs Farther Than Thought (1)
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The San Andreas fault is longer than thought, say geologists. Satellite images show that mud pots and miniature volcanoes in the southeastern part of California's Imperial County are not randomly scattered, but arranged in a linear pattern -- a telltale sign of a tectonic rift beneath. In a paper published today in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, researchers from the United States Geological Survey suggest that the rift belongs to the San ...
Mini-Microscope Could Lead to Cell-Sorting Implants (7)
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Imagine a microscope implanted into your body that could automatically sort out cancerous cells based on how they looked. That's the long-term promise of a lensless microscope that Caltech researchers describe this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Exploiting technology commonly used in consumer digital cameras, the M&M-size microscope is able to provide resolution comparable to an optical microscope at a mere fraction of the cost, perhaps as cheaply as ...
The Digg Science Review (22)
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Like it or not, what gets made popular on the social media site Digg influences what young males between the ages of 16 and 30 know about science. There's plenty of smart, timely, interesting science news on the site, but much of the linked content is recycled, lame, or downright wrong. So, your friendly Wired Science contributors, Brandon Keim and myself, have created this weekly series, The Digg Science Review, to help you parse the ...
Tell the UK Government How to Popularize Science (1)
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The British government wants to get people excited about science, and they desperately need your ideas, because their initial effort seems to be tremendously uninspired. At the heart of the Vision for Science and Society campaign is a cluttered website sprinkled with twitter feeds, facebook groups, and embedded youtube videos. Its take home message: We desperately want to get everyone excited about science, or at least comfortable with it, for the sake of our economy. ...
Telescope Mirror Built From Simulated Lunar Materials (3)
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NASA researchers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland have been working on a way to build a telescope on the far side of the moon from indigenous lunar materials. So far it is working. It is an inspiring tale for those committed to "living off the land." Physicist Peter Chen mixed simulated lunar regolith (the word for lunar 'soil'), with carbon nanotubes and small amounts of epoxy to create lunar concrete. The ...
Why China's Olympian Efforts to Clean Up Beijing's Air Won't Work (13)
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China will begin perhaps the world's most-ambitious pollution-control project this Sunday as government officials frantically try to clean the air of Beijing, one of the world' most-polluted cities. Beijing's environmental authorities have instituted a bewildering array of measures in hopes of cutting pollution ahead of the 2008 Olympics. They're instituting traffic bans, shutting down factories and unleashing cloud seeders as part of the city's $17 billion anti-pollution regimen. And yet, at least in terms of ...
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Vitak said:
Having been in China last summer, I can attest to the insanely high air pollution, and I can assure the country that no matter what they do, they cannot get rid of air pollution on that level in a month. Silly country.
Amazing Stat: California Uses More Gas than China (1)
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Given all the news coverage about the rise of the Chinese economy, you could be forgiven for thinking that the world's most populous country is hogging all the world's resources, while the developed nations are fighting for scraps. But, at least with transportation fuel, you'd be wrong. California alone uses more gasoline than any country in the world (except the US as a whole, of course). That means California's 20 billion gallon gasoline and diesel ...
Side Effects Reveal New Drug Targets (2)
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Headaches, dizziness, irregular heartbeats and diarrhea: new findings suggest that these unwanted drug effects could have a silver lining. In as study published yesterday in Science, German researchers systematically analyzed the side effects of 746 drugs. Similar side effects, they reasoned, could point to similar molecular actions; in some drugs, the mechanisms were already known, but others proved a surprise. Among these were Donezepil, an Alzheimer's whose side effects overlapped with the antidepressant Venlaxafine, suggesting ...
Fossils Solve Darwin-Stumping Evolutionary Puzzle (1)
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Two new fossils have provided missing pieces to one of the most perplexing evolutionary puzzles: the freakish eyes of flatfish. Though flatfish ancestors had standard-position fish eyes, their descendants -- among them the dinnertime favorites halibut and sole -- have eyes on the same side of their head. This makes perfect evolutionary sense for a predator that hides by lying flat on the ocean floor, but the intermediary steps seemed impossible to justify. How did ...
