Cool Science!!!!

Listen to Einstein

2009-08-19T07:26:00.001-05:00

And look deep into nature to understand everything better. The Truth is Out There!. GGL

Huge telescopes to show what universe was like more than 13 billion years ago

By A. Pawlowski
CNN

"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better" -- Albert Einstein

This galaxy, as seen by Hubble, is 50 million light years away. The new telescopes promise even sharper images.

1 of 3 (CNN) -- It may not be possible to travel back in time, but seeing stars and galaxies as they looked millions or even billions of years ago is no problem thanks to telescopes, the closest thing we have to time machines.

Now, astronomers are holding their breath to see what they'll observe and discover with a new generation of huge telescopes set to be built around the world.

Peering ever deeper into space and further back in time, the powerful devices will be able to show what the universe was like when it was just a few hundred million years old and emerging from a period of total darkness after the Big Bang.

"[We'll be] looking at the first generation of stars forming in the universe, which is kind of a cool idea: The time when the lights went on in the universe. There was no light before that time," said Daniel Fabricant, associate director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

His institution is one of several research organizations and universities developing the Giant Magellan Telescope, to be built in Las Campanas, Chile, by 2018.

'Eye on the sky'

Bigger is better in the world of reflecting telescopes, which rely on primary mirrors to collect light. The bigger the primary mirror, the more light it can gather and the fainter the objects astronomers can see.

The world's largest optical and infrared telescopes have primary mirrors that measure about 10 meters (32 feet) across. But the Giant Magellan Telescope will more than double that diameter, with a monster primary mirror spanning almost 25 meters (80 feet).

If the Magellan is the first new-generation star gazer to be built, it may not remain the record holder for long. Another consortium of organizations and universities is preparing to construct the aptly named Thirty Meter Telescope on the Mauna Kea summit in Hawaii, also scheduled for completion in 2018.

Big Bang 101
• The Big Bang Model is a broadly accepted theory for the origin and evolution of the universe.

• It suggests that about 13.7 billion years ago, the portion of the universe we can see today was only a few millimeters across.

• It has since expanded from this hot, dense state into the vast and much cooler cosmos we live in.

• The Big Bang did not happen at a single point in space as an "explosion."

• It is better thought of as the simultaneous appearance of space everywhere in the universe.

• The "Dark Ages," a period of time when there was no light, followed the Big Bang.

• The first objects illuminated the universe a few hundred million years later.

Source: NASA.gov Trumping them all may be the European Extremely Large Telescope, dubbed "the world's biggest eye on the sky," which is to have a primary mirror 42 meters (137 feet) in diameter and is also scheduled to start operation in 2018. No site has been chosen, though Argentina, Chile, Morocco and Spain are being considered.

Astronomers hope these giants will fill in gaps in knowledge about key moments in the early days of the universe. See some of the amazing photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope

"Right now, we can see to almost 13 billion years [back], but our best models tell us the age of the universe is almost 14 billion years, so it's this whole epoch when galaxies are actually first starting to form that we can't really see very well," said Elizabeth Barton, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, and a member of the Science Advisory Committee for the Thirty Meter Telescope.

"So the Thirty Meter Telescope will let us do things like find some of the first galaxies to form and characterize them to figure out what the conditions were actually like and how big these things were when they were forming." Blog: Will the Big Crunch follow the Big Bang?

Seeing the past

Looking so far back in time may sound like science fiction, but it's possible because light travels at a finite speed and takes a certain amount of time to get from one place to another, said Marla Geha, an assistant professor of astronomy at Yale University.

In our own cosmic neighborhood, it takes the light from the sun eight minutes to reach Earth, so when you look at a beautiful sunrise, you see the star as it appeared eight minutes ago. If the sun were to suddenly go dark, you wouldn't know it for those several minutes.

The same concept of seeing objects as they appeared in the past holds true on a much bigger scale.

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Blog: Will the Big Crunch follow the Big Bang?
"The light from the nearest star [outside the solar system] takes a couple of years to get to us. The light from the farthest star in the Milky Way takes 100,000 years to get to us," Geha said.

"Since the universe is about 14 billion years old, and as we're looking at things that are farther away, we're looking at light that's taken half or more than half of the age of the universe to get to us."

Some of that light is from the first stars to ever form -- fascinating to astronomers because they were probably much larger and brighter than those we find in the present-day universe, Fabricant said.

Closer to home, astronomers hope to see planets orbiting other stars -- perhaps young "Earths" in the process of formation -- and observe other solar systems, he added.

Sharper than Hubble

The pictures will likely be spectacular. Despite being ground-based, all of the next-generation telescopes promise images several times sharper than those produced by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope thanks to adaptive optics, technology that corrects for the "wiggling" of the Earth's atmosphere. Twinkling stars may be romantic to look at, but they're a big headache for astronomers trying to get a sharp picture.

One way to combat the distortion is to shoot laser beams into the sky to create fake stars and then measure how their appearance is changed by the atmosphere and take the appropriate counter-measures -- all at hundreds of times a second.

"You know what a perfect image looks like, you know what you observe, and then you know what you need to do to correct the image," Fabricant said.

"The idea is ... to have the mirror wiggle exactly opposite to take out the twinkling," Geha added.

Until the ground-based giants are built, Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will be helping to answer key questions about the universe. Webb is scheduled to be launched in 2014, about the time Hubble's mission will end.

Operating much farther from Earth and equipped with a primary mirror more than twice the diameter of Hubble's, Webb is designed to look deeper into space to see the earliest stars and galaxies, according to NASA.

Researchers on the competing projects say there's a certain rivalry about making the big discoveries but emphasize that the most important thing is that somebody makes them.

"It's a competition where you want the other guy to succeed as well," Fabricant said.

Distruption Toleran Networks (DTN)

2009-07-13T08:59:00.000-05:00

"Space Internet" to Link Worlds by 2011?
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
July 9, 2009
For all its might, the World Wide Web is still limited to, well, our world.
But that's quickly changing with the advent of an "interplanetary internet" that planners say will revolutionize space communication.

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The Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) system, which entered another phase of testing this week, will allow astronauts to Google from the moon or tweet their observations from space.
But DTN provides far more than a connection to check your email. It's also essential for simplifying space command and control functions—such as power production or life-support systems—crucial for future space initiatives.
"You need an automated communications technology … to sustain planetary exploration on the scale that NASA and others want to perform over the next decade," said Kevin Gifford, a senior research associate at BioServe Space Technologies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
"DTN enables the transition from a simple point-to-point network, like a walkie-talkie, to a true multimode network like the Internet."
After a decade of development DTN has advanced quickly over the past year, and NASA missions are planning to adopt the network by 2011. In November 2008 NASA test-drove the network by sending space images to and from the EPOXI spacecraft, some 20 million miles (32 million kilometers) from Earth.
DTN protocols were also installed on the International Space Station in May, and summer testing began the first week of July.
Houston, We're Fixing a Problem
Though tweeting astronauts have gotten a lot of press, "the reality is that they [don't really] tweet or have browsing capability on the International Space Station," explained Gifford, who is part of a large, cooperative DTN effort that has also included NASA and Internet veterans.
"Right now they actually voice down a simple blurb, and the tweet is operated manually from Houston," he said. In fact most current space communication involves humans manually scheduling each and every link, sometimes weeks or even months in advance for distant spacecraft, and dictating exactly which data are sent and when.

Adrian Hooke, a veteran of the Apollo 11 mission launch team, manages the new space DTN project.

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"Typically spacecraft go off and do their thing, gather up data, and then on some schedule they connect to the ground and [we] pull down the results of what it has been doing and send up instructions for the next time period," Hooke said.
Such manual operations are inefficient and expensive. But simply extending Earth's Internet into space won't work.
The Web uses Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), a type of communication language in which hosts and computers must be constantly connected.
This rarely happens in space, where intermittent connections are the norm because of the vast distances involved and the tendency of orbiting moons, rotating planets, and drifting satellites to temporarily disrupt wireless lines of communication.
Communications Leap
Typical space delays, even those caused by solar storms, are handled in stride by DTN, Hooke said.
Each node in the network—whether it's the International Space Station or a small orbiting robot—stores all the data it receives until a clear opportunity arises to pass its "bundle" along to the others in the network. DTN nodes do not discard data when a destination path can't be identified.
Hooke likens this "store and forward" process to a basketball team systematically passing the ball downcourt to players closer to the hoop.
The result, he explained, will be a communications leap akin to that between the post office and the telephone.
"A letter is a pretty self-contained story, it says do this or order that, and you mail it off and wait for a response."
But the new DTN system will open a more consistent line of back-and-forth communication.
Edge of the Solar System
DTN is already used for earthbound projects.
Scientists, for instance, are using the system to tag and track wildlife with a data-delivery capacity far more reliable than past satellite-based networks.
DTN can also bring broadband Web to remote areas with few communication structures, connecting remote humans such as the Arctic's Sami people via satellite with far shorter time lags.
The U.S. military has also embraced the technology to help keep lines of communication open in remote areas—or when other infrastructure is destroyed.
So far, DTN doesn't seem to have a catch, experts say.
"There are no physical limits on where the protocols would stop working," Hooke said.
"We could use it to [send messages to] the edges of the solar system—the question is, how long will you wait for a response?" - GGL

San Andreas Ready for Big One?

2009-07-10T11:43:00.000-05:00

Mysterious Tremors Detected Along San Andreas Fault
Friday, July 10, 2009

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LOS ANGELES — Scientists have detected a spike in underground rumblings on a section of California's San Andreas Fault that produced a magnitude-7.8 earthquake in 1857.

What these mysterious vibrations say about future earthquakes is far from certain. But some think the deep tremors suggest underground stress may be building up faster than expected and may indicate an increased risk of a major temblor.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, monitored seismic activity on the fault's central section between July 2001 and February 2009 and recorded more than 2,000 tremors. The tremors lasted mere minutes to nearly half an hour.

• Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Natural Science Center.

Unlike earthquakes, tremors occur deeper below the surface and the shaking lasts longer.

During the study period, two strong earthquakes hit — a magnitude-6.5 in 2003 and a magnitude-6.0 a year later. Scientists noticed the frequency of the tremors doubled after the 2003 quake and jumped six-fold after 2004.

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Tremor episodes persist today. Though the frequency of tremors have declined since 2004, scientists are still concerned because they are still at a level that is twice as high as before the 2003 quake.

The team also recorded unusually strong rumblings days before the 2004 temblor.

Results of the research appear in Friday's issue of the journal Science. The work was funded by the U.S. Geological Survey and National Science Foundation.

"The fact that the tremors haven't gone down means the time to the next earthquake may come sooner," said Berkeley seismologist and lead researcher Robert Nadeau.

Nadeau first discovered tremors deep in the San Andreas Fault in 2005. Before that, the phenomenon was thought only to occur in Earth's subduction zones, where one tectonic plate dives beneath another.

USGS seismologist Susan Hough found the latest observations intriguing, but said it's too soon to know what they mean.

"We don't have enough data to know what the fault is doing in the long term," said Hough, who had no part in the research

Monkey and Grammar

2009-07-09T07:43:00.001-05:00

Now I am really embarassed at my bad grammar! - GGL

Monkeys Recognize Poor GrammarMatt Kaplan
for National Geographic News

July 8, 2009
Monkeys can form sentences and speak in accents—and now a new study shows that our genetic relatives can also recognize poor grammar.

"We were really curious whether monkeys could even detect the common trend found in human language to add sounds to word edges, like adding 'ed' in English to create the past tense," said lead study author Ansgar Endress, a linguist at Harvard University.

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Previous research in cotton-top tamarins had shown that the animals can understand basic grammar, for instance, identifying which words logically follow other words in a sentence.

But that same study, published in the journal Science in 2004, found that monkeys did not understand complex grammar, such as when words in a sentence depend on each other but are separated.

While that study suggested monkeys were deaf to complex communication, the new research shows that tamarins can grasp at least one advanced concept: prefixes and suffixes.

Wordplay

For their study, Endress and colleagues played recordings of made-up English words to a population of captive cotton-top tamarins for roughly 30 minutes a day.

Half of the tamarins were exposed to words with a varied stem but a constant suffix (such as bi-shoy, mo-shoy, and lu-shoy). The other half were exposed to a constant prefix followed by a varied stem (such as shoy-bi, shoy-mo, and shoy-lu).

The following day, individual tamarins were brought into an observation enclosure equipped with an audio speaker and video-recording equipment to capture their behavior. These tamarins were then exposed to more words.

Many of the words followed the same language rules that the tamarins had heard the day before, with half hearing "shoy" as a suffix and half hearing it as a prefix.

However, every once in a while, the researchers would play a recording of an "incorrect" word. For instance, the speaker would broadcast "shoy" as a suffix when it had previously been presented as a prefix, or vice versa.

Mental Machinery

Other biologists who were not aware of the research question were asked to watch and note every time the small mammals turned their heads toward the speaker.

When tamarins were exposed to words that "broke" the rules they had learned, they looked toward the speaker in a startled manner, observers noted.

(Related: "Monkeys Can Subtract, Study Finds.")

The finding is dramatic, Endress explained, because it reveals that our distant cousins seem to have the mental machinery to identify verbal structures like suffixes and prefixes.

The research will appear this week in the journal Biology Letters

Oldest Bible and Newest Tech

2009-07-07T09:45:00.000-05:00

Oldest known Bible goes onlineStory

By Richard Allen Greene

LONDON, England (CNN) -- The world's oldest known Christian Bible goes online Monday -- but the 1,600-year-old text doesn't match the one you'll find in churches today.

The British government bought most of the pages of the ancient manuscript in 1933.

1 of 2 Discovered in a monastery in the Sinai desert in Egypt more than 160 years ago, the handwritten Codex Sinaiticus includes two books that are not part of the official New Testament and at least seven books that are not in the Old Testament.

The New Testament books are in a different order, and include numerous handwritten corrections -- some made as much as 800 years after the texts were written, according to scholars who worked on the project of putting the Bible online. The changes range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.

And some familiar -- very important -- passages are missing, including verses dealing with the resurrection of Jesus, they said.

Juan Garces, the British Library project curator, said it should be no surprise that the ancient text is not quite the same as the modern one, since the Bible has developed and changed over the years.

"The Bible as an inspirational text has a history," he told CNN.

"There are certainly theological questions linked to this," he said. "Everybody should be encouraged to investigate for themselves."

That is part of the reason for putting the Bible online, said Garces, who is both a Biblical scholar and a computer scientist.

"Scholars will want to look very closely at it, and some of the Web site functionality is specifically for them -- the ability to search the text, the ability to highlight a word, the degree of detail is particularly interesting for scholars interested in the text," he said.

But, he added, "It's for everyone, really a wide audience, because of curiosity, because they appreciate the value of it."

By the middle of the fourth century, when the Codex Sinaiticus was written, there was wide but not complete agreement on which books should be considered authoritative for Christian communities, according to the Web site where the Codex is posted.

The Bible comes from the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai desert, where a scholar named Constantine Tischendorf recognized its significance in 1844 -- and promptly took part of it, Garces explained.

"Constantine Tischendorf was in search for ancient manuscripts, so he appreciated the age and value of it," Garces said.

He took a handful of pages to Germany to publish them, then returned in 1853 and in 1859 for more. On that last trip, he took 694 pages, which ended up in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The Soviet government decided to sell them in 1933 -- to raise money to buy tractors and other agricultural equipment.

The British government bought the pages for £100,000, raising half the money from the public. Garces called that event one of the first fundraising campaigns in British history.

Film footage from the time shows crowds of people turning out to see the manuscript, which was considered a national treasure, he said.

Though the Bible has been reassembled online, in the real world it remains scattered.

Most of it is in London. Eighty-six pages are held at the University Library in Leipzig, Germany, parts of 12 pages are held at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, and 24 pages and 40 fragments remain at St. Catherine's Monastery, recovered by the monks from the northern wall of the structure in June 1975.

The manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. (A copy held at the Vatican dates from about the same period.) Older copies of individual portions of the Christian Bible exist, but not as part of a complete text.

The Codex also includes much of the Old Testament that was adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians.

That portion includes books not found in the Hebrew Bible and regarded in the Protestant tradition as apocryphal, such as 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, 1 & 4 Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach.

The New Testament portion includes the Epistle of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermas.

As it survives today, Codex Sinaiticus comprises just over 400 large leaves of parchment -- prepared animal skin -- each of which measures 15 inches by 13.6 inches (380 mm by 345 mm).

Falling into a black hole

2009-07-02T09:26:00.001-05:00

It took 100,000 lines of computer code to creat this video! Some people have too much time (and government funding!) on their hands! - GGL

Mississippi Fatties!

2009-07-02T08:57:00.000-05:00

Mississippi's Still Fattest but Alabama Closing In

By LAURAN NEERGAARD AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON July 1, 2009 (AP)

Obesity report shows adults continue to pack on pounds in the U.S.Mississippi's still king of cellulite, but an ominous tide is rolling toward the Medicare doctors in neighboring Alabama: obese baby boomers. It's time for the nation's annual obesity rankings and, outside of fairly lean Colorado, there's little good news. In 31 states, more than one in four adults are obese, says a new report from the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

And obesity rates among adults rose in 23 states over the past year, and no state experienced a significant decline.

"The obesity epidemic clearly goes beyond being an individual problem," said Jeff Levi, executive director of the Trust, a nonprofit public health group.

It's a national crisis that "calls for a national strategy to combat obesity," added Robert Wood Johnson vice president Dr. James Marks. "The crest of the wave of obesity is still to crash."

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The report provides one of the first in-depth looks at obese boomers, and its implications are sobering. This first wave of aging boomers will mean a jump of obese Medicare patients that ranges from 5.2 percent in New York to a high of 16.3 percent in Alabama, the report concluded. In Alabama, nearly 39 percent of the oldest boomers are obese.

Bikini Clad Babes Control Men's Minds

2009-07-02T08:43:00.001-05:00

Like who DIDN'T know that! (But ladies, it isn't our fault, it is our genes!)

Men see bikini-clad women as objects, psychologists say

By Elizabeth Landau
CNN

CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) -- It may seem obvious that men perceive women in sexy bathing suits as objects, but now there's science to back it up.

Images of women in bikinis prompted brain responses in men associated with using tools.

New research shows that, in men, the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up when viewing images of women in bikinis.
The research was presented this week by Susan Fiske, professor of psychology at Princeton University, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"This is just the first study which was focused on the idea that men of a certain age view sex as a highly desirable goal, and if you present them with a provocative woman, then that will tend to prime goal-related responses," she told CNN.
Although consistent with conventional wisdom, the way that men may depersonalize sexual images of women is not entirely something they control. In fact, it's a byproduct of human evolution, experts say. The first male humans had an incentive to seek fertile women as the means of spreading their genes.
"They're not fully conscious responses, and so people don't know the extent to which they're being influenced," Fiske said. "It's important to recognize the effects."
The participants, 21 heterosexual male undergraduates at Princeton, took questionnaires to determine whether they harbor "benevolent" sexism, which includes the belief that a woman's place is in the home, or hostile sexism, a more adversarial viewpoint which includes the belief that women attempt to dominate men.
In the men who scored highest on hostile sexism, the part of the brain associated with analyzing another person's thoughts, feelings and intentions was inactive while viewing scantily clad women, Fiske said. Visit CNNHealth.com, your connection for better living
Men also remember these women's bodies better than those of fully-clothed women, Fiske said. Each image was shown for only a fraction of a second.
This study looked specifically at men, and did not test women's responses to similar images.
A supplementary study on both male and female undergraduates found that men tend to associate bikini-clad women with first-person action verbs such as I "push," "handle" and "grab" instead of the third-person forms such as she "pushes," "handles" and "grabs." They associated fully clothed women, on the other hand, with the third-person forms, indicating these women were perceived as in control of their own actions. The females who took the test did not show this effect, Fiske said.
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That goes along with the idea that the man looking at a woman in a bikini sees her as the object of action, Fiske said.
The findings are consistent with previous work in the field, and resonate, for example, with the abundance of female strip clubs in comparison to male strip clubs, said Dr. Charles Raison, psychiatrist and director of the Mind/Body Institute at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Raison was not involved in the study.
Previous research found that people tend to similarly dehumanize those who are homeless or drug addicts, although the phenomenon in this case is somewhat different, Fiske said. People have reactions of avoidance toward the homeless and drug addicts, and the opposite for scantily clad women.
The broader purpose of the research was to explore circumstances under which people treat one another as the means to an end, Fiske said.
Past studies have also shown that when men view images of highly sexualized women, and then interact with a woman in a separate setting, they are more likely to have sexual words on their minds, she said. They are also more likely to remember the woman's physical appearance, and sit closer to her -- for instance, at a job interview.
Taken together, the research suggests that viewing certain images is not appropriate in the workplace, Fiske said.
"I'm not advocating censorship, but I do think people need to know what settings should discourage the display and possession of these kinds of things," she said.
Both women and men have something to learn from this line of research, Raison said. Women should be aware of how they are perceived when wearing provocative clothing, and men shouldn't let feelings of impersonal sexual longing interfere with their more personal relationships with other women, including female friends. "Many men make foolish choices because of sexual attraction," he said.
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"The suggestion might be that there's some hard-wiring there that can interfere with the average man's ability to interact on deeper levels with really hot looking stranger women in bikinis," he said.
Women may also depersonalize men in certain situations, but published research on the subject has not been done, experts say. Evolutionary psychology would theorize that men view women as objects in terms of their youth and apparent fertility, while women might view men as instrumental in terms of their status and resources, Fiske said.
Another avenue to explore would be showing images of men's wives and girlfriends in bikinis, Raison said. He predicts the objectifying effect would not happen in this context

I knew that I always liked dogs

2008-12-11T04:42:00.002-06:00

Most of them at least. The rest of them know who they are! (the yappy little ones, and the crazy junk-yard ones)

Dogs Have Innate Sense of Fairness, Study Finds
Tuesday, December 09, 2008

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WASHINGTON — No fair!

What parent hasn't heard that from a child who thinks another youngster got more of something? Well, it turns out dogs can react the same way.

Ask them to do a trick and they'll give it a try. For a reward, sausage say, they'll happily keep at it.

But if one dog gets no reward, and then sees another get sausage for doing the same trick, just try to get the first one to do it again.

Indeed, he may even turn away and refuse to look at you.

Dogs, like people and monkeys, seem to have a sense of fairness.

"Animals react to inequity," said Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria, who lead a team of researchers testing animals at the school's Clever Dog Lab. "To avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently."

Similar responses have been seen in monkeys.

Range said she wasn't surprised at the dogs' reaction, since wolves are known to cooperate with one another and appear to be sensitive to each other. Modern dogs are descended from wolves.

Next, she said, will be experiments to test how dogs and wolves work together.

"Among other questions, we will investigate how differences in emotions influence cooperative abilities," she said via e-mail.

In the reward experiments reported in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Range and colleagues experimented with dogs that understood the command "paw" to place their paw in the hand of a researcher.

It's the same game as teaching a dog to "shake hands."

Those that refused at the start — and one border collie that insisted on trying to herd other dogs — were removed. That left 29 dogs to be tested in varying pairs.

The dogs sat side-by-side with an experimenter in front of them. In front of the experimenter was a divided food bowl with pieces of sausage on one side and brown bread on the other.

The dogs were asked to shake hands and each could see what reward the other received.

When one dog got a reward and the other didn't, the unrewarded animal stopped playing.

When both got a reward all was well.

One thing that did surprise the researchers was that — unlike primates — the dogs didn't seem to care whether the reward was sausage or bread.

Possibly, they suggested, the presence of a reward was so important it obscured any preference.

Other possibilities, they said, are that daily training with their owners overrides a preference, or that the social condition of working next to a partner increased their motivation regardless of which reward they got.

And the dogs never rejected the food, something that primates had done when they thought the reward was unfair.

The dogs, the researchers said, "were not willing to pay a cost by rejecting unfair offers."

Clive Wynne, an associate professor in the psychology department of the University of Florida, isn't so sure the experiment measures the animals reaction to fairness.

"What it means is individuals are responding negatively to being treated less well," he said in a telephone interview.

But the researchers didn't do a control test that had been done in monkey studies, Wynne said, in which a preferred reward was visible but not given to anyone.

In that case the monkeys went on strike because they could see the better reward but got something lesser.

In dogs, he noted, the quality of reward didn't seem to matter, so the test only worked when they got no reward at all, he said.

However, Wynne added, there is "no doubt in my mind that dogs are very, very sensitive to what people are doing and are very smart."

-GSL

Oops!

2008-11-26T07:59:00.000-06:00

Zoo solves mystery of celibate polar bears

TOKYO, Japan (CNN) -- Puzzled zookeepers in northern Japan have discovered the reason why their attempts to mate two polar bears kept failing: Both are female.

A 4-year-old polar bear sent to impregnate a female polar bear at a zoo in Kushiro was found to be female as well.

The municipal zoo in the city of Kushiro in Hokkaido brought in a polar bear cub three years ago. They named it Tsuyoshi, after the popular baseball outfielder Tsuyoshi Shinjo, and waited until it reached reproductive age.

In June, the zoo introduced Tsuyoshi to its resident bear, an 11-year-old female named Kurumi, and waited for sparks to fly.

But much to the disappointment of zookeepers, Tsuyoshi never made any amorous advances toward Kurumi.

Earlier this month, zookeepers put Tsuyoshi under anesthesia to get to the bottom of the matter. That's when they made their discovery: Tsuyoshi is a female.

Still, the Kushiro zoo plans to keep Tsuyoshi because he -- or rather, she -- has become immensely popular with visitors.

"I have rather mixed feelings, given the need for breeding, but Tsuyoshi is an idol for Kushiro," Yoshio Yamaguchi, head of the Kushiro zoo, told Japan's Kyodo news agency.

Tsuyoshi will even keep her name.

"We will not be changing it to 'Tsuyoko' since it is loved by citizens (by the current name)," Yamaguchi said.

"Ko" is a common suffix for a Japanese female name.

Meanwhile, Tsuyoshi's "brother," who was adopted by another zoo, has also turned out to be female, Kyodo reported

You think they woulda checked! = GSL

Global Warming Running Amok

2008-10-31T05:00:00.000-05:00

7 killed in Tibet's 'worst snowstorm'

BEIJING, China (CNN) -- At least seven people have been found dead after "the worst snowstorm on record in Tibet," China's state-run news agency reported Friday.

About 1,350 people were rescued in Lhunze County -- another 300 were trapped -- after nearly five feet (1.5 meters) of snow blanketed much of Tibet this week.

The storm caused buildings to collapse, blocked roads and killed about 144,000 head of cattle, the state-run China Daily newspaper reported.

The seven people who died either froze to death or were killed as a result of collapsing buildings, and one person is still missing, China Daily said

More proof that evolution is a fraud.

2008-10-31T01:55:00.001-05:00

"Living Fossils" in New Zealand, or simply another creature that withstood the Deluge.

Living fossil found on New Zealand mainland

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- A rare reptile with lineage dating back to the dinosaur age has been found nesting on the New Zealand mainland for the first time in about 200 years, officials said Friday.

An adult tuatara lizard is seen basking on a tree stump at the Karori Sanctuary in Wellington, New Zealand.

Four leathery, white eggs from an indigenous tuatara were found by staff at the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary in the capital, Wellington, during routine maintenance work Friday, conservation manager Rouen Epson said.

"The nest was uncovered by accident and is the first concrete proof we have that our tuatara are breeding," Epson said. "It suggests that there may be other nests in the sanctuary we don't know of."

Tuatara, dragon-like reptiles that grow to up to 32 inches (80 centimeters), are the last descendants of a species that walked the earth with the dinosaurs 225 million years ago, zoologists say.

They have unique characteristics, such as two rows of top teeth closing over one row at the bottom. They also have a pronounced parietal eye, a light-sensitive pineal gland on the top of the skull. This white patch of skin -- called its "third eye" -- slowly disappears as they mature.

A species native to New Zealand, tuatara were nearly extinct on the country's three main islands by the late 1700s due to the introduction of predators such as rats. They still live in the wild on 32 small offshore islands cleared of predators.

A population of 70 tuatara was established at the Karori Sanctuary in 2005. Another 130 were released in the sanctuary in 2007.

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The sanctuary, a 620-acre (250-hectare) wilderness minutes from downtown Wellington, was established to breed native birds, insects and other creatures securely behind a predator-proof fence.

Empson said that the four eggs -- the size of ping pong balls -- were unearthed Friday but that there were likely more because the average nest contains around ten eggs.

The eggs were immediately covered up again to avoid disturbing incubation.

If all goes well, juvenile tuatara could hatch any time between now and March, she said.

Holy Dancing Dinosaurs!

2008-10-22T03:08:00.001-05:00

'Dino Dance Floor' Found In Ariz.
Site Has 1,000+ Dinosaur Tracks, Professor Says

PAGE, Ariz. -- University of Utah geologists said they have discovered prehistoric animal tracks on the Arizona-Utah border so densely packed they're calling it a "dinosaur dance floor."

The three-quarter-acre site is in Arizona in the Coyote Buttes North area of the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness.

Estimated to be 190 million years old, the site has more than 1,000 and perhaps thousands of dinosaur tracks, averaging a dozen per square yard in places, said Marjorie Chan, professor and chair of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah.

The site is so dense with dinosaur tracks that geologists said it reminds them of a popular arcade game in which participants dance on illuminated, moving footprints.

"It was a place that attracted a crowd, kind of like a dance floor," Chan said.

A study identifying the dinosaur track site was published in the October issue of the international paleontology journal Palaios. Chan is senior author of the study, which was conducted for a master's degree thesis by former graduate student Winston Seiler.

The range of track shapes and sizes reveals at least four dinosaur species gathered at the watering hole, with the animals ranging from adults to youngsters, Seiler said.

"The different size tracks, 1 inch to 20 inches long, may tell us that we are seeing mothers walking around with babies," he said.

The new study is the first scientific publication to identify the impressions as dinosaur footprints on a trample surface, Chan said.

Numerous dinosaur track sites have been found in the western United States, including more than 60 in Navajo Sandstone, where actual dinosaur bones are rare.

"Unlike other trackways that may have several to dozens of footprint impressions, this particular surface has more than 1,000," Seiler and Chan wrote. And they said the density of tracks is much greater than it is at even larger track sites, such as the one at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park in Utah.

The 2.4-inch-wide tail-drag marks, which are up to 24 feet long, are a special discovery because there are fewer than a dozen dinosaur tail-drag sites worldwide, Seiler said. Four tail drags were within the 10 plots he surveyed, and there are others nearby.

"Dinosaurs usually weren't walking around with their tails dragging," Seiler said.

Seiler said he first saw the site in 2006. "At first glance, they look like weathering pits -- a field of odd potholes," he said. "But within about five minutes of wandering around, I realized these were dinosaur footprints."

When the footprints were made 190 million years ago, "the continents were arranged so this area was in the tropics" and was part of the supercontinent named Pangaea, Seiler said. "It was a desert, like the Sahara but much larger than the Sahara is today, covering much of Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada," he said.

Seiler said he envisions the dinosaurs were "happy to be at this place, having wandered up and down many a sand dune, exhausted from the heat and the blowing sand, relieved and happy to come to a place where there was water."

The trample surface "helps paint a picture of what it was like to live back then," he said. "Tracks tell us what the dinosaurs were doing, what their behavior was, what life was like for them, what they did on a day-to-day basis."

After the dinosaurs left their prints, the trample surface was covered by shifting dunes, which eventually became Navajo Sandstone. Then, the rock slowly eroded away, exposing the tracks. The tracks eventually will erode, too, Seiler said

Posted by GSL

Very Cool "Historic" Meteor Visible From Cyprus

2008-10-08T02:25:00.002-05:00

Hello Science Fans,

I received an astronomy alert the other night that an asteroid the size of a mini-van would become a metor somewhere over Egpyt, and would probably be visible from Cyprus. I got up at the un-Godly hour of 3:30 AM to look for the event. It was a crystal clear night in Cyprus, which it is about 300 nights a year, and Orion was high in the SE. At approximately 5:46 local time the metor appeared on schedule. This was the historic part. Never has an impact with Earth's atmosphere of a specific asteroid been forecast. This one flared as an extremely bright "bolide" as it streaked across the sky. It was at least as bright as the full-moon, but in a much smaller area. It left the tell-tal ion-trail across the sky long after the bright streak, but none of the mysterious sounds of bolides was heard by this observer in Cyprus. Happy star-gazing all.

GSL

Very interesting interview with "Godfather" of sea-water aquacultre, on LAND!

2008-10-03T05:13:00.002-05:00

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Atmospheric physicist Carl Hodges founded the Seawater Foundation in 1977 in an attempt to alleviate some of the world's most complex ecological problems. Hodges' unique approach draws seawater inland, irrigating otherwise barren coastal desert regions and turning them green.

Carl Hodges, founder of the Seawater Foundation.

The results are spectacular, with seawater-tolerant plants (including the biofuel crop salicornia) providing a new home for wildlife as well as creating food, jobs and prosperity for previously poverty-stricken areas. In Eritrea, Africa, the Seawater Foundation has created the world's first integrated sea farm for shrimp, fish and halophytes covering over 1000 hectares.
Principal Voices spoke to Hodges on the site of his latest project on the Mexico coast.
CNN: Give us a sense of the Seawater Foundation's mission.
Carl Hodges: Well, 30 years ago, we began to use seawater for agriculture and to create wealth and jobs. And I thought there were additional things that maybe business wouldn't necessarily include. So we thought we needed a partnership between a very socially orientated organization and a classical business -- they both needed to move towards one another a little bit. And that we would have a partnership that would actually address the kind of global problems that you see here [in Mexico].
CNN: Can you explain how you go about making man-made rivers?

CH: Well, you cut a channel. Except you cut it as a river. For example, in Brownsville, Texas, they have a sea channel that's a port. It comes inland 33 kilometers and ships come in. We made that with big dredging machines. You cut a channel, but you call it a river, because it doesn't go on to a dead end. Instead the water goes in, and it arrogates things. When you stand at the mouth of it, you feel exactly like you would at the mouth of a river. Except you look down and the water is going in and not coming back. It goes in to produce animals, shrimp and fish, and then with their excrement involved, it arrogates trees that turn into forests. The forests have meadows of crop that provide food and fuel. And beauty. I think that's an important value.
CNN: How can the sea save us from climate change?
CH: Well, the sea presents a problem because the sea levels are coming up. But it's also an opportunity. By bringing that rising sea water onto the land we can arrogate agriculture. A new form of agriculture. Greenery will take carbon out of the air -- we have to take some out -- because we're putting too much in. And it will produce a biofuel that doesn't put any carbon in.
The problem sort of pushes us to a solution. We've either got to build sea walls, or we've got to move tens of millions of people away from the edge of the sea. But instead of that -- instead of cost -- we invest money in these new production systems, creating jobs, creating wealth, and taking big steps in solving global warming.
CNN: At the heart of your vision for the agriculture is a plant called salicornia. Tell us about that.
CH: It's an amazing plant. When we first started looking for plants, we looked at over 700 in some detail, and we listed them. And the only reason we had salicornia was that it was pretty.
A young lady was counting the seed, and she wiped her fingernails on a paper towel and she noticed that the towel looked oily. And she was right. It has about 30-40% very high quality vegetable oil. And so we said: 'My God, it's an oil seed crop'. It's like soy bean.
And so out of the 700 we picked 20, then we picked three, and one of the three was salicornia. And now it's the star.
Salicornia produces a high quality vegetable oil on sea water. On land it's not competitive for food production. It produces at a rate that is probably one of the most economical biofuels on the planet. We suggested it as a bio fuel in 1982. And in 1993 we actually ran a vehicle on salicornia oil and wrote a paper where I said it will be bio fuel of the future.
CNN: What do you envisage will happen with these seawater projects in the future?
CH: I see sea water rivers around the world. Right now we're looking at 34 countries where we could have 50 rivers of the scale we've been looking at in Mexico and bigger. And they would come inland and they would arrogate a quantity of desert coast in an ecologically sound fashion. It would be on a scale that takes so much water inland that it would stop sea level rises in about ten years.
The world would continue to build more of these over the next 40, 50, 60 years. Not only would we catch up with stopping sea level rise, we would also be making a significant contribution to taking enough carbon out of the air. With efficient systems, transportation and power plants, we'd stop global warming.
CNN: What did you learn from the sea farm venture you set up in Eritrea in 1999?
CH: In my 50 years of science, my four and a half years in Eritrea were the most rewarding. I loved every minute of it. The thing I learned that was most strong was what people really need is purpose and hope...and the sea. People -- I mean women and children -- would come to work at night, singing, carrying rocks on their head -- at their initiative -- to finish a pond, so that they and I would be pleased that it was done. I used to go to work in the morning and just damn near cry. I loved the people, I loved the project, and the world will look back upon that one day as one of the really significant projects.
CNN: What is your view on how the governments of the world's richest nations are tackling the issue of climate change?
CH: Well, I'm embarrassed by the U.S. administration for the last eight years. I don't think they're bad people. I just think that they wish it were different. They weren't prepared to address it. I think there's leadership in these issues in Europe. And I think that there is hope in both Presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican.
CNN: This is a big vision. Just how realistic is your solution?
CH: I think 100%. I think there's a lot of very good people. Scientists, businessmen, people working night and day here that are convinced that it will happen. And we have lots of experience. This is not an overnight idea because the seas are coming up. We started sea water agriculture. We started trying to de-salt the oceans in the 60s with solar systems,, and realized that we'd be much better off to make the deserts green. We'd be much better off trying to get plants that are already out there in the estuaries of the world, and domesticate them, get products out of them and grow what are called halophytes - plants that tolerate and enjoy sea water. And that's what we've done.

Volunteers Needed for Earthquake Study (PC only thing needed)

2008-09-29T03:34:00.001-05:00

You too can support big distributed computing seismology study by just donating the idle time of you PC.

GSL

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/25/earthquake.trackers.ap/index.html

New record for oldest rocks

2008-09-26T00:15:00.000-05:00

4.28 Billion-Year-Old Canadian Bedrock May Be Oldest on Earth

Thursday, September 25, 2008

WASHINGTON — A traveler walking along the eastern bank of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec can stand on the oldest bedrock known on Earth. This ancient section of the planet's crust may be as much as 4.28 billion years old, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
By measuring tiny variations in the chemical composition of the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone from Hudson's Bay, researchers Jonathan O'Neil of McGill University in Montreal and Richard Carlson of the Carnegie Institution of Washington were able to date various rock samples to between 3.8 billion and 4.28 billion years ago.
Previously the oldest piece of bedrock was the Acasta Gneiss in the Canadas's Northwest Territories, which is 4.03 billion years old.
Some zircon grains found in Western Australia have been dated to 4.36 billion years, but those are individual materials, not intact sections of bedrock.

Rubber Ducks, NASA, and Climate Research

2008-09-23T02:38:00.002-05:00

Very creative use of simple technology to answer basic issues of glacier processes, crtical to understanding their role in climate change.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/22/nasa.ducks/index.html

Remote Sensing Used to help Giant Kangaroo Rat

2008-09-19T05:26:00.004-05:00

Very interesting use of remote sensing to help an endangered species.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/18/rats.satellites.ap/index.html

Nearby Galaxy Loaded with "Dark Matter"

2008-09-19T05:26:00.002-05:00

Hello to all Science Gal friends. Thanks for your nice blog for those of us interested in all of Natural Science. The following article is an amazing discovery of satellite galaxies to the Milky Way which are very massive, yet have few stars, and are thought to be full of the mysterious "Dark Matter".

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,424863,00.html

The Big Bang - Fact or Fiction

2008-09-11T09:16:00.000-05:00

The initial test of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland was completed yesterday. The first round was to send a particle around the collider in one direction. The next test will be to send a particle in the opposite direction. Ultimately there will be an experiment to send two particles in opposite directions to create a collision that is expected to simulate the Big Bang.

For many, the question of the big bang is simply fiction and for others it is absolute fact. Is there an in between? As a geologist I of course learned that the Big Bang was the prevailing and most accepted theory (except creationism) for the origin of the universe and earth as we know it. Once the planet was created, it is theorized that life evolved over time......

What happens if the experiment produces a tiny universe under the ground in Switzerland and what if evolution can be proven (although there is already plenty of proof) over time inside the Hadron collider?

I know I won't be popular for posting this. But consider that creationism and evolution do NOT have to be mutually exclusive. What are your thoughts?

The Hadron Collider aka Put Your Head Down and Kiss Your........

2008-09-09T14:31:00.001-05:00

OHHHH - not to be an alarmist or panic anyone but the Hadron Collider is going to be turned on tomorrow.... and there is a small chance that it could create a black hole,, oh my! However, if you read the safety statement on the CERN website, they don't seem to be too worried.

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html

Well, as my good friend BB says in his previous comment on my I love Rocks post, if indeed a black hole was created, then we could be forever suspended in that moment of time when it happens. So I would pose this question:

If you knew the exact moment that the black hole (if one indeed were to be generated by the collider) was going to be created and knowing that would be the moment you were stuck in forever, what would you want to be doing and/or experiencing at that moment......

Try to keep it rated PG13 if you can!

:-)

I Love Rocks!

2008-09-06T15:37:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the Cool Science blog. We are not talking temperature, we are talking neat, rad, cool, awesome, etc. science. So for everyone out there with a love of science, let's start some discussion!

If you are a scientist or an enthusiast, what is your favorite branch of science and why and is there a particular scientist that shaped your views on that aspect of science?

I grew up with a love of science, especially of geology, fueled by many hours spent sorting through rocks in the driveway and seeing fossils and strata in the smallest of rocks. As I went on through high school i continued to be fascinated by geology and weather as well but chose the path to study geology because there was no meteorology program in my state. I wish I could have done both but I was such a big baby that I was afraid to go far from home to school. I do not regret my choices, as since then I have continued on to pursue studies in oceanography and computer science and have had an awesome career as a geophysicist, oceanographer, and computer scientist. I spent six weeks studying geology in Switzerland for my field studies program and it was truly amazing. I actually saw an exposed section of the cretaceous-tertiary boundary and dug (hammered) into the limestone where the first achaeopteryx was found. If you love geology and paleontology you know or have an opinion about archaeopteryx. This fossil is long considered to be proof that dinosaurs and birds are related, even evolved from each other. All I will say is that it was so cool to be there where it was discovered.

To learn more about archaeopteryx:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/archaeopteryx/info.html

While I was studying geology, I worked every other semester as part of the cooperative education program and ultimately have worked in the same place (different and varying jobs) for my whole career. During my work semesters I rode on deep ocean survey ships mapping the bottom of the ocean and later worked analyzing sea surface temperature from imagery. I have since moved on to a Information Technology position and also own my own computer services business.

There are so many cool things about science in general and I was lucky at a young age to be encouraged to pursue my dreams of science. I am living proof that you can do or be anything you want!

I am still a geologist at heart, and plan vacations around places where I can stop and dig for fossils!!! You have probably seen me on the side of the road with my rock hammer!

So tell me what you love or hate for that matter, about science!

:-)