Nazca Lines (submitted by Stefano Montalto)

The Nazca Lines are a series of ancient geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. They were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. The high, arid plateau stretches more than 80 kilometres (50 mi) between the towns of Nazca and Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana about 400 km south of Lima. Although some local geoglyphs resemble Paracas motifs, scholars believe the Nazca Lines were created by the Nazca culture between 400 and 650 CE.^[1] The hundreds of individual figures range in complexity from simple lines to stylized hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, fish, sharks, orcas, llamas, and lizards.
The lines are shallow designs made in the ground by removing the ubiquitous reddish pebbles and uncovering the whitish ground beneath. Hundreds are simple lines or geometric shapes; more than seventy are designs of animal, bird, fish or human figures. The largest figures are over 200 metres (660 ft) across. Scholars differ in interpreting the purpose of the designs, but they generally ascribe religious significance to them.

The geometric ones could indicate the flow of water or be connected to rituals to summon water. The spiders, birds, and plants could be fertility symbols. Other possible explanations include: irrigation schemes or giant astronomical calendars.^[2]

Due to the dry, windless and stable climate of the plateau and its isolation, for the most part the lines have been preserved. Extremely rare changes in weather may temporarily alter the general designs.

Albinism: Do they get sunburned easily? (from our class discussion- 6 A)

Taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albinism
AlbinismAlbinism (from Latin albus, "white"; see extended etymology, also called achromia, achromasia, or achromatosis) is a congenital disorder characterized by the complete or partial absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes due to absence or defect of an enzyme involved in the production of melanin. Albinism results from inheritance of recessive gene alleles and is known to affect all vertebrates, including humans. The most common term used for an organism affected by albinism is "albino". Additional clinical adjectives sometimes used to refer to animals are "albinoid" and "albinic".
Albinism is associated with a number of vision defects, such as photophobia, nystagmus and astigmatism. Lack of skin pigmentation makes the organism more susceptible to sunburn and skin cancers.
Signs and Symptoms
Most albinistic humans appear white or very pale as the melanin pigments responsible for brown, black, and some yellow colorations are not present.
Because individuals with albinism have skin that partially or entirely lacks the dark pigment melanin, which helps protect the skin from the sun's ultraviolet radiation, their skin can burn more easily from overexposure.^[3]
The human eye normally produces enough pigment to colour the iris and lend opacity to the eye. However, there are cases in which the eyes of an albinistic person appear red or purple, depending on the amount of pigment present. Lack of pigment in the eyes also results in problems with vision, related and unrelated to photosensitivity.
The albinistic are generally as healthy as the rest of the population (but see related disorders below), with growth and development occurring as normal, and albinism by itself does not cause mortality,^[4] although the lack of pigment increases the risk of skin cancer and other problems.
Genetics
Most forms of albinism are the result of the biological inheritance of genetically recessive alleles (genes) passed from both parents of an individual, though some rare forms are inherited from only one parent. There are other genetic mutations which are proven to be associated with albinism. All alterations, however, lead to changes in melanin production in the body.^[4][7]
The chance of offspring with albinism resulting from the pairing of an organism with albinism and one without albinism is low. However, because organisms can be carriers of genes for albinism without exhibiting any traits, albinistic offspring can be produced by two non-albinistic parents. Albinism usually occurs with equal frequency in both genders.^[4] An exception to this is ocular albinism, which it is passed on to offspring through X-linked inheritance. Thus, ocular albinism occurs more frequently in males as they have a single X and Y chromosome, unlike females, whose genetics are characterized by two X chromosomes.^[8]
There are two different forms of albinism; a partial lack of the melanin is known as hypomelanism, or hypomelanosis and the total absence of melanin is known as amelanism or amelanosis.

Being Multilingual helps with Multitasking (submitted by Marianne de Bedout)

At a session of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, researchers discussed some of the benefits of being multilingual, such as heightened focus and better multitasking. Cynthia Graber reports

February 18, 2011 

To hear the podcast, go here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=being-multilingual-helps-with-multi-11-02-18

According to a variety of studies my languages may be providing mental benefits beyond the ability to chat with locals when I travel. Judith Kroll, from Penn State University, discussed findings from a number of her lab’s papers on February 18th at a session of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Common thought, she explained, holds that bilingual children are hindered in their cognitive development. But it turns out that bilingual children and adults perform better when it comes to multitasking and focusing on important information. That’s because the other languages are always present in the background. So the multilingual is always making choices in selecting the appropriate language for a given situation. In the lab’s most recent paper, that scenario held true for deaf students who use American Sign Language and written English.
Ellen Bialystok, from Toronto’s York University, explained that bilingual children are better at prioritizing tasks than monolinguals. She also found that multilingualism may help protect against age-related mental decline, such as Alzheimers and dementia.
So maybe [the fact that I speak a few languages (in Hebrew)] helps me pop between different topics for this podcast.

[The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast,]

Cosmic Census Finds Crowd of Planets in our Galaxy

WASHINGTON -- Scientists have estimated the first cosmic census of planets in our galaxy and the numbers are astronomical: at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way.

At least 500 million of those planets are in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold zone where life could exist. The numbers were extrapolated from the early results of NASA's planet-hunting Kepler telescope.

Kepler science chief William Borucki says scientists took the number of planets they found in the first year of searching a small part of the night sky and then made an estimate on how likely stars are to have planets. Kepler spots planets as they pass between Earth and the star it orbits.

So far Kepler has found 1,235 candidate planets, with 54 in the Goldilocks zone, where life could possibly exist. Kepler's main mission is not to examine individual worlds, but give astronomers a sense of how many planets, especially potentially habitable ones, there are likely to be in our galaxy. They would use the one-four-hundredth of the night sky that Kepler is looking at and extrapolate from there.

Jon Lomberg / NASA

A artist's rendering shows what our galaxy might look as viewed from outside our galaxy. The cone illustrates the neighborhood of our galaxy that the Kepler Mission is searching as it looks for habitable planets.

Borucki and colleagues figured one of two stars has planets and one of 200 stars has planets in the habitable zone, announcing these ratios Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. And that's a minimum because these stars can have more than one planet and Kepler has yet to get a long enough glimpse to see stars that are further out from the star, like Earth, Borucki said.

For example, if Kepler were 1,000 light years from Earth and looking at our sun and noticed Venus passing by, there's only a one-in-eight chance that Earth would also be seen, astronomers said.

To get the estimate for the total number of planets, scientists then took the frequency observed already and applied it to the number of stars in the Milky Way.

Many years scientists figured there were 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, but last year a Yale scientist figured the number was closer to 300 billion stars.

Either way it shows that Carl Sagan was right when he talked of billions and billions of worlds, said retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, who praised the research but wasn't part of it.


And that's just our galaxy. Scientists figure there are 100 billion galaxies.


Borucki said the new calculations lead to worlds of questions about life elsewhere in the cosmos. "The next question is why haven't they visited us?"


And the answer? "I don't know," Borucki said.

Ms. H2Os Note: But, I can't help but wonder if they have visited and the public hasn't been informed. How many of you believe that life exists outside our planet? I do.

Do you know the seven natural wonders of the world?

These are The Seven Natural Wonders of the World. Please read below to discover and explore these wonders. They are truly amazing.

Aurora Borealis

(This is on my list of things to see before I die)
The auroras, also known as the Northern Lights, are naturally occurring lights that create intriguing and spectacular displays in the sky.
Read More

Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon is a massive gorge located in the state of Arizona, United States of America created by the Colorado River.
Read More

Paricutin

Paricutin is a cinder cone volcano in Michoacán, Mexico. It's the youngest in America and it's birth was witnessed by a human.

Read More

 

Mount Everest

Highest mountain in the world reaching a peak of 29,029 feet and the greatest altitude on the earth's surface.
Read More

 

Victoria Falls

Victoria Falls is a waterfall in southern Africa on the borders of Zambia and Zimbabwe. It is attributed to as the world’s largest sheet of falling water.

Read More

Great Barrier Reef

The great barrier reef is the world’s largest individual formation created by living organisms.
Read More

Harbor of Rio de Janeiro

Spectacular bay eroded by the Atlantic ocean and surrounded by majestic mountains that offer many different perspectives of the harbor.
Read More

 Seeing all of these things really makes me want to go travel!!!

Biggest Solar Flare in Year (submitted by Agustin Solano)

Explosive magnetic reconnection aims "firehose" of charged gas at Earth.

National Geographic News

Published February 16, 2011

The most powerful solar flare in four years exploded over the sun late Monday, according to NASA.

The magnetic instability that caused the flare also unleashed a blast of charged particles that should hit Earth's atmosphere tonight, possibly sparking auroras farther south than usual, experts say.

(Video: Solar Flare Causes "Sunquakes.")

The most powerful explosions in the solar system, solar flares occur when magnetic field lines on the sun cross, cancel each other out, then reconnect.

These "explosive reconnections" release huge amounts energy as heat—in this case, a short blast measuring roughly 35 million degrees Fahrenheit (19 million degrees Celsius), according to physicist Dean Pesnell, project scientist for NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO.

In visible light, only the small dark surface blotches of sunspot 1158, which spawned the flare, could be seen. Without the SDO satellite, "you would never have known what was happening above" the sunspot, Pesnell said.

But the satellite's ability to detect many wavelengths of light allowed the observatory to image not only the flash, in extreme ultraviolet, but also streams of charged gas arcing along magnetic field lines—a "perfect example of solar physics." (See a January picture of a large solar flare.)

Not that SDO is perfect. Its digital-imaging hardware, for example, was overwhelmed by the intensity of the flare, resulting in overexposed areas that make the flare look bigger than it was.

Imaged flawlessly, the flare, at its most intense, would "look like a ball of light floating above the surface," Pesnell said, "about the size of a house."

(See pictures of solar eruptions.)

Solar Flare Plus Aurora-Inducing "Wind"?

Monday's fleeting magnetic breakdown also sent "a firehouse of material spraying out from the sun" when "spring loaded" streams of charged gases were freed from the magnetic fields that hold them in place on the sun.

Such so-called coronal mass ejections can pose radiation threats to astronauts and overwhelm Earth's magnetic field, potentially disrupting satellite communications and power grids on the ground.

But the solar gale now heading our way isn't expected to be particularly harmful. That's because, according to predictions, "it won't hit us dead-on," Pesnell said.

Still, he said, strong geomagnetic activity is expected Wednesday night, perhaps most visibly in the form of auroras—the southern and northern lights, which occur when atoms above Earth's gain energy from solar charged particles, then release it as light.

The U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center, he said, forecasts a 30 percent chance of auroras as far south as Washington, D.C.

Stargazers below the northern U.S. should look for a diffuse reddish glow, however, rather than the neon-hued "curtains" seen around the Poles. Furthermore, the nearly full moon will effectively dim any auroras Wednesday night.

(Pictures: Huge Solar Storm Triggers Unusual Auroras.)

X-Rated Solar Flare

Monday's blast was the first X-level solar flare since December 2006—X being the highest level of the flare-rating system.

But at X2.2—or 0.00022 watts per square meter—the Valentine's Day flare wasn't unexpectedly powerful.

"It fits in just perfect" with forecasts that show the sun entering a period of increased activity, Pesnell said.

The recent explosion, he added, has nothing on the giant blasts of the early 2000s. That most recent active period spawned the biggest solar flare on ever directly measured in November 2003—a blast more than ten times as powerful as Monday's.

Compared to that "big honker," he said, this week's flare "is pretty typical—except it was beautifully typical, because we saw it with SDO."

Creepy Madagascan Beasts Rub Their Back Hairs Together To Make Squeaks (submitted by Yoel Patt)

The only mammals in the world that chirp like crickets — by rubbing body parts together — are these strange shrew-like creatures called streaked tenrecs. A BBC film crew has captured their stridulations on camera for the first time.
The animals have special quills on their backs, which look like pale teeth and are noticeably different from the rest of its coarse fur and porcupine-like spines. When a young tenrec gets lost, as in the video below, its family members rub these quills together to produce high-pitched squeaks. The sound penetrates the rainforest undergrowth to help guide the tenrec back to its kin.
About 30 species of tenrecs are found throughout Madagascar, with a few living on the African mainland. The animals share a common ancestor with elephants, aardvarks and manatees. But the only one to communicate in this way is the lowland streaked tenrec, found only in Madagascar.
Their communications are mostly outside the range of human hearing, so filmmakers used bat detectors to ensure they could pick up the tenrecs' ultrasonic calls. They found that the seemingly quiet creatures were actually quite chatty.

Plants detect bombs by changing colors (submitted by Andres Pereira)

A scientist at Colorado State University has developed a way to make every day plants one of the first lines of defense in the war on terror. The plants won't change before your eyes, yet, but lab work being done right now makes green plants turn white if they detect explosive, biological or chemical weapons in their environment. Looking to potential future uses, one could envision someone walking by these plants in an airport with hidden explosives and the plants changing color to alert security.

Professor June Medford and fellow scientists on the campus of CSU, located in Ft Collins, Colorado are now working with the U.S. Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to develop hi-tech plants for use in airports and other public areas. "We actually modify the seed," Medford explains, "and then it's a trait that is stable and stays with it forever. It's very empowering because it will tell you that there's an explosive around, get the security guys here!"

The idea may sound like science fiction to some, but Medford says using plants to detect chemicals and pathogens makes perfect sense. Just think of bananas, which are picked green but will not ripen in northern climates unless exposed to the gas ethylene. Medford has modified her plants to react when exposed to specific agents by turning from green to white. Medford says, "It's a program we can put in any plant species."

Like most living organisms, plants have built in defense mechanisms, but "...plants can't run and hide from a threat," Medford explains, "they have to have a way to detect and respond and they do that already. But they detect things like bugs and things like that. So what we've done is teach them a new trick...to detect things we care about."

Medford's list of possibilities seems endless. In addition to explosives detection, plants can be modified to react to disease causing microbes, pollutants, even carbon monoxide or radon gases in homes. Medford also says members of the military in Iraq and Afghanistan could use these greens to detect Improvised Explosive Devices (IED's).

But if you are curious about the science of all this, don't get too detailed with Medford.  During the interview with Fox News, there were numerous times when she was unable to answer a question, for security purposes.  The delicate nature of national security, she explains, means keeping some of this stuff secret.  "I think when you have a system where the bad guys don't know that there's a detector there, I think it's very very powerful," Medford says, "because it can tell our security guys, the police, where to come and and where to look.  Maybe there's a terrorist, a home grown terrorist making bombs and then we could potentially find those."

Before it can become practical, however, Medford says the time it takes for a plant to turn from green to white has to be reduced. "It works right now, but it'll work in hours, we need to cut it down to minutes and seconds and we think that's very doable and indeed we're getting some very good data to support that."

50 Interesting Science Facts (submitted by Daniel De Matheu)

As I was looking at the link Daniel sent me, I realized that there is a new app called "A+ Science Facts!" for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch on the iTunes app store.  (Very cool!)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/a-science-facts/id333156919?mt=8
Here are a couple of screen shots of the app.

1 – The speed of light is generally rounded down to 186,000 miles per second. In exact terms it is 299,792,458 m/s (equal to 186,287.49 miles per second).

2 – It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun’s surface to the Earth.

3 – 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.

4 – The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.

5 – Every year, over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.

6 – When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 4,800 kilometers away in Australia.

7 – Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.

8 – Every year lightning kills 1000 people.

9 – In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf .

10 – If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.

11 – Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.

12 – The Earth is 4.56 billion years old…the same age as the Moon and the Sun.

13 – The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.

14 – Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.

15 – When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.

16 – If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.

17 – Astronauts cannot belch – there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.

18 – The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level.

19 – One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was the size of a …pea.

20 – DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.

21 – The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.

22 – The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.

23 – The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.

24 – Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.

25 – Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.

26 – The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus – In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.

27 – Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 – the patient lived for 18 days.

28 – An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.

29 – ‘Wireless’ communications took a giant leap forward in 1962 with the launch of Telstar, the first satellite capable of relaying telephone and satellite TV signals.

30 – The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects.

31 – In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.

32 – Giraffes often sleep for only 20 minutes in any 24 hours. They may sleep up to 2 hours (in spurts – not all at once), but this is rare. They never lie down.

33 – There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.

34 – An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.

35 – On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.

36 – The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.

37 – A quarter of the world’s plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010.

38 – Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.

39 – At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.

40 – The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.

41 – Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.

42 – More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.

43 – The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.

44 – It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.

45 – Around a million, billion neutrinos from the Sun will pass through your body while you read this sentence.

46 – The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of 35,797 feet.

47 – Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.

48 – Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big Bang.

49 – Even traveling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda.

50 – A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.

Solar Powered Hornet May Lead to Renewable Energy (submitted by Couloir Hanson)

A team of scientists at Tel Aviv University‘s School of Physics and Astronomy have discovered that a type of hornet is absorbing sunlight and turning it into useful energy. It’s the first animal that has ever been discovered to possess that ability, and the theory is we might be able to harness our own version of the process for alternative energy! How cool!
The Oriental hornet absorbs energy from the sun and turns it into electric power in the brown and yellow parts of its body (mainly, the hornet’s body shell or exoskeleton). In addition, its body also has a heat pump system (like those found in air conditioners) that is able to keep the hornet’s body cooler than its surroundings, which helps out when the insect is foraging around in the sun all day.

“The interesting thing here is that a living biological creature does a thing like that,” says physicist Professor David Bergman. “The hornet may have discovered things we do not yet know.”
Things that researchers hope may be applied for human use. Currently they are trying to mimic the bio-mechanisms that make the solar processing in the hornet possible, but they haven’t had much luck… Still, eventual developments could lead to new forms of solar energy collection, and that is a truly exciting discovery!

Quest for Designer Bacteria Uncovers a Spy (submitted by Andrea Garcia)

ScienceDaily (Feb. 14, 2011) — Scientists have discovered a molecular assistant called Spy that helps bacteria excel at producing proteins for medical and industrial purposes.

Bacteria are widely used to manufacture proteins used in medicine and industry, but the bugs often bungle the job. Many proteins fall apart and get cut up inside the bacteria before they can be harvested. Others collapse into useless tangles instead of folding properly, as they must in order to function normally.

A research team led by James Bardwell, who is a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology and of biological chemistry, as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, at the University of Michigan, developed a way to coerce bacteria into making large quantities of stable, functional proteins. Then, in exploring why these designer bacteria were so successful, the scientists discovered the molecular helper, Spy.
The research is scheduled for online publication Feb.13 in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.
In the first phase of the research, the team designed biosensors that directly link protein stability to the antibiotic resistance of bacteria. When a poorly folded, unstable protein is inserted into the middle of the biosensor in a bacterium, it disrupts the bug's resistance to antibiotics. When the protein is stabilized, resistance is restored.
The researchers inserted a particularly unstable protein into Escherichia coli (E. coli), which forced the bacteria to either adapt by improving protein stability or die when exposed to antibiotics. Through a "directed evolution" experiment, in which the scientists selected colonies with increasing antibiotic resistance -- and increasing protein stability -- the team generated designer bacteria that produced up to 700 times more of the previously unstable protein.
"It is exciting to realize that if even bacteria are asked in the right way, they can come up with good solutions to hard problems," said postdoctoral fellow Shu Quan, who spearheaded the work.
In looking to see why the designer bacteria were so much better at producing proteins, the scientists found that the efficient microbes were making much more of a small protein called Spy. Further study showed that the cradle-shaped Spy aids in protein refolding and protects unstable proteins from being cut up or sticking to other proteins.
"Our work may usher in an era of designer bacteria that have had their folding environment customized so that they can now efficiently fold normally unstable proteins," Bardwell said.
The work was conducted in Bardwell's lab at U-M. Mirek Cygler's laboratory at McGill University solved the structure of the Spy protein. In addition to Bardwell, Quan and Cygler, the paper's authors are masters students Philipp Koldewey and Stephan Hofmann; undergraduate students Nadine Kirsch and Jennifer Pfizenmaier; postdoctoral research associates Tim Tapley, Linda Foit and Guoping Ren; associate professor Ursula Jakob and associate professor Zhaohui Xu; all of U-M; and Karen Ruane and Rong Shi of McGill University.
The researchers received funding from Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Cargo Rocket to Supply Space Station (submitted by Alex Borbon)

An unmanned Ariane rocket is scheduled to launch a cargo vessel into orbit on Tuesday in Europe's second mission to carry supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), space officials said on Friday.
The modified Ariane launcher will lift off at 7.08 p.m. (2208 GMT) from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America, carrying a 20 tonne cargo module, the heaviest payload ever launched on an Ariane rocket.
The vessel, dubbed "Johannes Kepler" in honor of the 17th century German astronomer and mathematician, is the second Automatic Transfer Vehicle (ATV) Europe has contributed to the ISS program. The first docked with the ISS in early 2008.
The ATV is designed to deliver fuel, food, clothing and oxygen to the ISS crew as well as spare parts and is due to dock with the ISS on February 23.
Billed by the European Space Agency (ESA) as a major challenge for Europe's space program, the ATV docks with the ISS without human intervention.
"The precision of the ATV is tremendous compared to the mass of the vehicle," Nico Dettmann, ESA's ATV Programme Manager said in a television interview. "We have redesigned the (cargo) racks and every rack is 50 kg (110 lb) lighter," he said.
The ATV has three times the cargo capacity of Russia's Progress vehicle and was developed by the ESA as part of a barter arrangement with the U.S. space agency NASA.
Instead of paying cash for its share of the station's operating costs and also to secure additional astronaut access, ESA is providing the ATV and other components.
"A full ATV mission costs around 350 million Euros ($475 million), the ATV spacecraft itself accounting for around 200 million Euros ($270 million)," Pal Hvistendahl, ESA spokesman told Reuters.
"The program that led to the development, manufacturing, qualification and launch of ATV-1 (launched in 2008) cost 1.3 billion Euros ($1.75 billion)," he said.
Four more ATVs are planned for the space station, and NASA may buy more with the ESA as its space shuttle fleet is due to be retired after its next planned launch on February 24.
The space station, which is about 85 percent complete, is a $100 billion project by 15 nations.

Protecting the Coral Reef (submitted by Felipe Solera)

Extinction Predictor to Help Protect Coral Reefs

ScienceDaily (Feb. 14, 2011) — More than a third of coral reef fish species are in jeopardy of local extinction from the impacts of climate change on coral reefs, a new scientific study published in Ecology Letters has found.

(Local extinction refers to the loss of species from individual locations, while they continue to persist elsewhere across their range.)

A new predictive method developed by an international team of marine scientists has found that a third of reef fishes studied across the Indian Ocean are potentially vulnerable to increasing stresses on the reefs due to climate change.
The method also gives coral reef managers vital insights to better protect and manage the world's coral reefs, by showing that local and regional commitment to conservation and sustainable fisheries management improves prospects for coral recovery and persistence between storms and bleaching events.
The team applied their 'extinction risk index' to determine both local and global vulnerability to climate change and human impacts. They tested the method by comparing fish populations before and after the major 1998 El Nino climate event which caused massive coral death and disruption across the Indian Ocean.
In all, 56 of the 134 coral fish species studied were found to be at risk from loss of their habitat, shelter and food sources caused by climate change. Those most in jeopardy were the smaller fishes with specialised eating and sheltering habits. Because most of these species have wide geographic ranges and often quite large local populations, few were at particular risk of global extinction.
"The loss of particular species can have a critical effect on the stability of an entire ecosystem -- and our ability to look after coral reefs depends on being able to predict which species or groups of fish are most at risk," explains lead author Dr Nick Graham of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University. "Until now, the ability to do this has been fairly weak."
"For example, we know that the loss of seaweed-eating grazing fishes can lead to coral reefs which have suffered some other form of disturbance being replaced by weeds. Protecting these fish, on the other hand, gives the corals a much better chance to recover.
"Where there is a widespread death of corals from a climate-driven event such as bleaching, the fish most affected are the ones that feed or shelter almost exclusively on coral. However when corals die off and the reef structure collapses, small reef fish generally are much more exposed to predators.
"By understanding which species and groups of fish are most at risk, we can better manage coral reefs and fish populations to ensure their survival in times of increasing human and climate pressure," adds Dr Shaun Wilson of the Western Australian Department for Environment and Conservation.
The study does, however, offer encouragement by showing that the fish most at risk from climate change are seldom those most at risk from overfishing or other direct human impacts, pointing to scope to manage reef systems and fishing effort in ways that will protect a desirable mix of fish species that promote ecosystem stability.
"Critically, the species of fish that are important in controlling seaweeds and outbreaks of deleterious invertebrate species are more vulnerable to fishing than they are to climate change disturbances on coral reefs. This is encouraging, since local and regional commitment to fisheries management action can promote coral recovery between disturbances such as storms and coral bleaching events," explains Dr Wilson.
They conclude that identifying the fish species most at risk and most important to ecosystem stability and then managing coral reefs to maintain their populations will help 'buy time' while the world grapples with the challenge of limiting carbon emissions and the resulting climate change.
The team adds that their novel approach to calculating extinction risk has wider application to conservation management beyond coral reef ecosystems and can readily apply to other living organisms and sources of stress.

Brain Cells Start Sending Signals Early (Submitted by Antonio Maklouf)

Brain cells start sending signals early

Fetal neurons show firing patterns similar to those seen in sleeping adults

 

The kicks and somersaults of a developing baby aren’t the only in utero calisthenics. Babies also flex their mental muscles months before birth.

Nerve cells from developing brains as young as 20 weeks old fire in a pattern that persists into adulthood, researchers report February 15 in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research provides a glimpse into the behavior of extremely young brain cells and could help scientists understand what happens when brain development goes awry.

Cells from the cerebral cortices of 20- to 21-week-old fetuses exhibit bursts of electrical activity interspersed with periods of quiet, researchers from the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington found. When the adult brain is sleeping, or under anesthesia, it also displays this busy-then-quiet firing pattern, suggesting it may be an intrinsic property of human brains.

The cerebral cortex deals with sensory information, thinking, emotion and consciousness. But even when not receiving input from the outside world, the nerve cells, or neurons, in this region oscillate between firing and resting.

“In adults, we go to sleep and the cortex is disconnected from the outside environment — it sleeps alone. But you see this quiet synchronized activity,” says Igor Timofeev of Laval University in Québec. That young nerve cells behave in a similar way long before they grapple with outside input suggests that the firing pattern “is a very basic feature of the brain that occurs in very early stages of development,” says Timofeev.

Scientists still don’t understand what purpose the nerve cell activity serves so early in development. Perhaps it is a flexing of mental muscles to help keep the cells alive, says neuroscientist Srdjan Antic, who led the new study. Having a burst of activity now and again may signal other brain cells that “‘Hey I’m here, look at me, maintain a connection with me,’” Antic says. “During sleep neurons do exactly that.”

Antic and colleagues probed the activity of neurons in lab dishes one at a time. While almost all of the cells exhibited the firing pattern, the team can’t say whether the firing was synchronized. If the cells do fire in waves, that could be their way of signaling their location to other brain cells, says neuroscientist William Moody of the University of Washington in Seattle.

Such wave signaling in mice brains plays a role in wiring the nervous system during development so that adjacent brain regions correspond to adjacent body parts. If these young cells are firing in waves, that activity could be part of this mapping process, Moody says.

“This is a huge deal,” he says of the new work. “They’ve taken the first step of looking at humans.”

There are several disorders that may result when neurons don’t end up in the right place. And autism spectrum disorders may also be related to improper firing, says Moody

Will we re-create the extinct Mammoths? (submitted by Ximena Alpizar)

Ice Baby

A near-perfect frozen mammoth resurfaces after 40,000 years, bearing clues to a great vanished species.

By Tom Mueller

Photograph by Francis Latreille

The mammoth herd approaches the rushing river. A calf ambles close to her mother's huge legs, brushing their long, glossy hair now and then with her trunk. The sky is brilliant blue, and a dry wind hisses through the grasses, which billow like oceanic swells across a steppe 1o,ooo miles wide, spanning the northern arc of the Ice Age world. The long winter is over; birdsong and the scent of damp loam fill the air.
Perhaps the warmth of the sun makes the mother careless, and for a moment she loses track of her calf. The baby wanders toward the water. She stumbles on the slippery riverbank and slides into a slurry of clay, sand, and fresh snowmelt. She struggles to free herself, but every movement drags her deeper. The mud gets in her mouth, her trunk, her eyes; disoriented, she gasps for breath but gets a mouthful of muck instead. Coughing, gagging, caught in a riptide of panic, she makes a dreadful high-pitched shriek that brings her mother running. Inhaling with all her force, the calf sucks the mud deep into her trachea, sealing her lungs. By the time her mother reaches the bank, the baby is partially submerged in the ice-cold mire and flailing feebly, rapidly sliding into shock. The mother screams and mills on the soft bank, drawing the rest of the herd. As they watch, the calf sinks beneath the surface.

Night falls. The herd moves on, but the mother lingers. Yellow moonlight throws her humpbacked shadow across the glistening mud. The moon sets, and stars glow in the chill heavens. Just before dawn, she takes a last look at the spot where the earth swallowed her baby, then turns and follows the herd north, toward summer pastures.

On a May morning in 2007, on the Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia, a Nenets reindeer herder named Yuri Khudi stood with three of his sons on a sandbar on the Yuribey River, holding council over a diminutive corpse. Though they'd never seen such an animal before, they knew it well from stories their people sang on dark winter nights in their storytelling lodges. This was a baby mamont, the beast the Nenets say wanders the frozen blackness of the underworld, herded by infernal gods just as the Nenets herd their reindeer across the tundra. Khudi had seen many mammoth tusks, the honey-colored, corkscrew shafts as thick as tree limbs that his people found each summer. But he had never seen an entire animal, let alone one so eerily well preserved. Apart from its missing hair and toenails, it was perfectly intact.
Khudi was uneasy. He sensed this was an important discovery, one that others should know about. But he refused to touch the animal, because the Nenets believe that mammoths are dangerous omens. Some Nenets even say that people who find a mammoth are marked for early death. Khudi vowed to placate the infernal powers with the sacrifice of a baby reindeer and a libation of vodka. But first he traveled 150 miles south to the small town of Yar Sale to consult with an old friend named Kirill Serotetto, who was better acquainted with the ways of the outside world. Serotetto listened to his friend's story, then bustled him off to meet with the director of the local museum, who persuaded the local authorities to fly Khudi and Serotetto back to the Yuribey River in a helicopter.
When they arrived on the sandbar, however, the mammoth had vanished.

Mammoths are an extinct group of elephants of the genus Mammuthus, whose ancestors migrated out of Africa about 3.5 million years ago and spread across Eurasia, adapting to a range of woodland, savanna, and steppe environments. The best known of these proboscideans is the woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, a close cousin of living elephants and about the same size. It first appeared in the middle Pleistocene more than 400,000 years ago, probably in northeastern Siberia. The woolly mammoth was highly adapted to cold, with a dense undercoat, guard hairs up to three feet long, and small, fur-lined ears. Immense curving tusks, used primarily for fighting, may have also been handy for foraging beneath the snow. Because mammoths often died and were buried in sediment that has been frozen ever since, many of their remains have survived into modern times, particularly in the vast deep freeze of Siberian permafrost.

Did Egyptians have Prosthetics? (submitted by Melania Benavides)

Mummy Remains Show False Toes Helped Ancient Egyptians Walk

ScienceDaily (Feb. 14, 2011) — Two artificial big toes -- one found attached to the foot of an ancient Egyptian mummy -- may have been the world's earliest functional prosthetic body parts, says the scientist who tested replicas on volunteers.

University of Manchester researcher, Dr Jacky Finch, has shown that a three-part wood and leather artefact housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, along with a second one, the Greville Chester artificial toe on display in the British Museum, not only looked the part but also helped their toeless owners walk like Egyptians.
The toes date from before 600BC, predating what was hitherto thought to be the earliest known practical prosthesis -- the Roman Capula Leg -- by several hundred years.
Dr Finch, who is based in the University of Manchester's KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology, recruited two volunteers whose right big toe had been lost in order to test exact replicas of the artificial toes in the Gait Laboratory at Salford University's Centre for Rehabilitation and Human Performance Research.
Writing in the Lancet, Dr Finch said: "To be classed as true prosthetic devices any replacement must satisfy several criteria. The material must withstand bodily forces so that it does not snap or crack with use. Proportion is important and the appearance must be sufficiently lifelike as to be acceptable to both the wearer and those around them. The stump must also be kept clean, so it must be easy to take on and off. But most importantly it must assist walking.
She continued: "The big toe is thought to carry some 40% of the bodyweight and is responsible for forward propulsion, although those without it can adapt well. To accurately determine any level of function requires the application of gait analysis techniques involving integrated cameras and pressure devices placed along a walkway."
The volunteers were asked to wear the toes with replica Egyptian sandals and, while neither design was expected to perform exactly like a real big toe, one of the volunteers was able to walk extremely well with both artificial toes. No significant elevation in pressure under the foot was recorded for either toe, although both volunteers said they found the Cairo toe particularly comfortable.
The Greville Chester toe -- made from cartonnage, a sort of papier maché made using linen, glue and plaster -- shows considerable signs of wear, while the Cairo toe has certain features, such as a simple hinge, a chamfered front edge and a flattened underside.
"The wear on the Greville Chester toe and the important design features on the Cairo toe led me to speculate that these toes were perhaps worn by their owners in life and not simply attached to the foot during mummification for religious or ritualistic reasons," said Dr Finch.
"However, until we were able to test replicas of both toes using volunteers under laboratory conditions, it remained uncertain if they could indeed help their owners to walk.
"My findings strongly suggest that both of these designs were capable of functioning as replacements for the lost toe and so could indeed be classed as prosthetic devices. If that is the case then it would appear that the first glimmers of this branch of medicine should be firmly laid at the feet of the ancient Egyptians."

Research: Popularity linked to Bullying (submitted by Nina Ferraro)

Study links teenage bullying to social status

As students get more popular, they're more likely to harass their peers, finds a study that reinforces an axiom of high school life.

Scientists have confirmed an axiom of teenage life: Kids intent on climbing the social ladder at school are more likely to pick on their fellow students.

The finding, reported in Tuesday's edition of the American Sociological Review, lends an air of authenticity to TV shows like "Gossip Girl" and the 2004 movie "Mean Girls." More importantly, it may suggest that efforts to combat bullying in schools should focus more closely on social hierarchies.

"By and large, status increases aggression," said sociologist Robert Faris of UC Davis, who led the study.

Faris and a colleague studied the relationships among 3,722 middle and high school students over the course of an academic year and found that the teenagers' propensity toward aggression rose along with their social status. Aggressive behavior peaked when students hit the 98th percentile for popularity, suggesting that they were working hard to claw their way to the very top.

However, those who were in the top 2% of a school's social hierarchy generally didn't harass their fellow students. At that point, they may have had little left to gain by being mean, and picking on others only made them seem insecure, Faris said.

The researchers quantified this by administering surveys to eighth-, ninth- and 10th-graders in 19 schools in North Carolina in fall 2004 and again in spring 2005. Students were asked to name up to five best friends. They were also asked to name up to five students they had picked on in the previous three months, and up to five students who had picked on them.

In cases where aggression occurred, students classified the events as physical attacks, direct verbal harassment or indirect offenses like spreading rumors or ostracizing classmates.

The surveys also asked about the students' grades, participation on sports teams, dating history, race and family income.

The results allowed Faris to create "social maps" of each school, charting all the positive and negative relationships among students.

At the beginning of the school year, 40% of students said they had harassed another classmate; in the second survey in the spring, 33% said they had done so. Higher social status — defined as occupying the hub of a school's social network rather than the periphery — in the fall predicted higher rates of aggression in the spring.

On average, each student was aggressive toward 0.63 fellow students at the end of the school year. A few particularly aggressive students — socially-central athletes — harassed as many as nine kids apiece.

Though the study reinforces popular stereotypes about social cliques in schools, it contradicts academic notions about aggression, Faris said.

"For a long time, there was emphasis on seeing aggression as a product of the home environment," he said. "Here we're getting a different picture."

The findings suggest that anti-bullying programs need to focus on the role of the nonviolent majority of students, said UCLA psychologist Jaana Juvonen, who studies bullying in schools.

"It's really critical for bystanders to speak up," said Juvonen, who wasn't involved in the study. "If there's an aggressive kid everyone bows down to, it sends a signal to the bully that what they're doing is working."

Rosalind Wiseman, a 17-year teaching veteran, said the study reflected the experience of many educators. It was just such behavior that prompted her to write "Queen Bees and Wannabes," the book that inspired the film "Mean Girls," in which a nice and slightly nerdy girl played by Lindsay Lohan becomes increasingly catty as her popularity soars.

"It's always nice to have backup," Wiseman said.

Bees can recognize human faces (submitted by Carla Pastora)

Bees can recognize human faces, study finds

Dec. 9, 2005
Special to World Science

Honeybees may look pretty much all alike to us. But it seems we may not look all alike to them. A study has found that they can learn to recognize human faces in photos, and remember them for at least two days.

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The findings toss new uncertainty into a long-studied question that some scientists considered largely settled, the researchers say: how humans themselves recognize faces.  The results also may help lead to better face-recognition software, developed through study of the insect brain, the scientists added.

Many researchers traditionally believed facial recognition required a large brain, and possibly a specialized area of that organ dedicated to processing face information. The bee finding casts doubt on that, said Adrian G. Dyer, the lead researcher in the study.

He recalls that when he made the discovery, it startled him so much that he called out to a colleague, telling her to come quickly because “no one’s going to believe it—and bring a camera!”

Dyer said that to his knowledge, the finding is the first time an invertebrate has shown ability to recognize faces of other species. But not all bees were up to the task: some flunked it, he said, although this seemed due more to a failure to grasp how the experiment worked than to poor facial recognition specifically.

In any case, some humans also can’t recognize faces, Dyer noted; the condition is called prosopagnosia.

In the bee study, reported in the Dec. 15 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, Dyer and two colleagues presented honeybees with photos of human faces taken from a standard human psychology test. The photos had similar lighting, background colors and sizes and included only the face and neck to avoid having the insects make judgments based on the clothing. In some cases, the people in the pictures themselves looked similar.

The researchers, with Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, tried to train the bees to realize that a photo of one man had a drop of a sugary liquid next to it. Different photos came with a drop of bitter liquid instead.

A few bees apparently failed to realize that they should pay attention to the photos at all. But five bees learned to fly toward the photo horizontally in such a way that they could get a good look at it, Dyer reported. In fact, these bees tended to hover a few centimeters in front of the image for a while before deciding where to land.

The bees learned to distinguish the correct face from the wrong one with better than 80 percent accuracy, even when the faces were similar, and regardless of where the photos were placed, the researchers found. Also, just like humans, the bees performed worse when the faces were flipped upside-down. 
“This is evidence that face recognition requires neither a specialised neuronal [brain] circuitry nor a fundamentally advanced nervous system,” the researchers wrote, noting that the test they used was one for which even humans have some difficulty.

Moreover, “Two bees tested two days after the initial training retained the information in long-term memory,” they wrote. One scored about 94 percent on the first day and 79 percent two days later; the second bee’s score dropped from about 87 to 76 percent during the same time frame.

The researchers also checked whether bees performed better for faces that humans judged as being more different. This seemed to be the case, they found, but the result didn’t reach statistical significance.

The bees probably don’t understand what a human face is, Dyer said in an email. “To the bees the faces were spatial patterns (or strange looking flowers),” he added.

Bees are famous for their pattern-recognition abilities, which scientists believe evolved in order to discriminate among flowers. As social insects, they can also tell apart their hivemates. But the new study shows that they can recognize human faces better than some humans can—with one-ten thousandth of the brain cells.

This raises the question of how bees recognize faces, and if so, whether they do it differently from the way we do it, Dyer and colleagues wrote. Studies suggest small children recognize faces by picking out specific features that are easy to recognize, whereas adults see the interrelationships among facial features. Bees seem to show aspects of both strategies depending on the study, the researchers added.

The findings cast doubt on the belief among some researchers that the human brain has a specialized area for face recognition, Dyer and colleagues said. 

Neuroscientists point to an area called the fusiform gyrus, which tends to show increased activity during face-viewing, as serving this purpose. But the bee finding suggests “the human brain may not need to have a visual area specific for the recognition of faces,” Dyer and colleagues wrote.

That may be helpful to researchers who develop face-recognition technologies to be used for security at airports and other locations, Dyer noted. The United States is investing heavily in such systems, but they still make many mistakes. 

Already, the way that bees navigate is being used to design “autonomous aircraft that can fly in remote areas without the need for radio contact or satellite navigation,” Dyer wrote in the email. “We show that the miniature brain can definitely recognize faces, and if in the future we can work out the mechanisms by which this is achieved,” this might suggest ideas for improved face recognition technologies.

Dyer said that if bees can learn to recognize humans in photos, then they reasonably might also be able to recognize real-life faces. On the other hand, he remarked, this probably isn’t the explanation for an adage popular in some parts of the world—that you shouldn’t kill a bee because its nestmates will remember and come after you. 

Francis Ratnieks of Sheffield University in Sheffield, U.K., says that apparent bee revenge attacks of this sort actually occur because a torn-off stinger releases chemicals that signal alarm to nearby hivemates. Says Dyer, “bees don’t normally go around looking at faces.”

* * *

Weird Science News of 2010

Onions generate electricity

Gills Onions produces up to 300,000 pounds of peels a day. Rather than waste them, the California company is now using the refuse to run its processing facility. Engineers installed machinery at the plant to grind and press the peels into 30,000 gallons of onion juice, which is fed into an anaerobic digester to produce methane that powers two 300-kw fuel cells. The system also presses the solid remains into 20 tons of onion cake that the company sells as cattle feed. Gills Onions expects the $9.5 million project, which earned this year’s top award from the American Council of Engineering Companies, to pay for itself within six years.

These diamonds were not separated at birth

Scientists disproved claims that two famous blue diamonds, both found in the same region of India in the 17th century, were cut from the same stone. The Hope Diamond, a 45.52-carat diamond at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and the 31.06-carat Wittelsbach-Graff Diamond, also on display at the museum until August, have strikingly similar blue color caused by traces of boron and emit nearly identical red-orange phosphorescence under ultraviolet light (shown left). But chemists at the Naval Research Laboratory, working with the Smithsonian, found differences in the atomic structures that prove they aren’t related, ending decades of speculation.

Dandelion – Enzyme = Tire

Scorned as a weed, the dandelion is a potential source of natural rubber, according to scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute in Munich, Germany. The white liquid that seeps from a broken dandelion stalk is natural latex, but the sap is ill-suited for industrial use because it immediately begins to harden. The researchers identified an enzyme in the plant that causes this rapid polymerization and found that the sap can produce five times more latex if the enzyme is chemically “turned off.” Dandelions might make an attractive backup as a rampaging fungus attacks rubber trees in Southeast Asia, where the vast majority of the world’s natural rubber is now grown.

Wireless Eyes

A team of MIT researchers has entered the race to develop an implant that can restore partial vision to the blind. Unlike other implants under development, MIT’s system does not place electrodes directly on the retina, which can damage the eye during implantation. Instead, the device stimulates nerves near the eyeball that carry visual information to the brain. A pair of eyeglasses, equipped with a camera, beams visual information and power to the chip. A coil around the iris relays the images to a chip attached to the side of the eyeball (above), which sends the data to electrodes implanted below the retina. The researchers won’t know what patients would “see” until they begin human trials in 2013.

Listening to Leaves

Western Washington University geophysicists are making localized air-pollution maps by tracking the magnetism of tree leaves. Car and some industrial pollution contains particles of magnetic iron oxide that stick to the leaves, making them magnetic.

Radar-friendly windmills

Thousands of megawatts’ worth of proposed wind farms in the U.S. have been blocked because aviation radar confuses the spinning turbines with aircraft. British defense firm QinetiQ and Danish turbine-maker Vestas have produced a turbine that minimizes radar returns by coating the turbine’s tower with radar-absorbent material and integrating stealthy composites into the blades.

World’s first inflatable seatbelt

Michigan-based Key Safety Systems has unveiled the world’s first inflatable car seatbelt, which enhances a traditional three-point shoulder belt with an airbag. When the vehicle detects a collision, the belt inflates with cold gas to five times its original width. The first belts will appear in Ford Explorers going into production this year.

Air cannon pirate deterrent

Commercial shipping vessels desperate for ways to defend themselves from pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia could soon have a nonlethal way to fight back. The Buccaneer, built by Wales-based BCB International, is a deck-mounted weapon that allows besieged sailors to disable attacking ships. The compressed-air device launches a coiled rope over a quarter-mile.

A parachute attached to one end of the rope controls the descent so that the rope lies across the surface of the water, entangling the propeller shaft of the threatening vessel. Many nations bar commercial ships from being armed, and adding weapons often increases insurance rates because of the risk of accidents. The Buccaneer is an attractive alternative to firearms.

Paper batteries

Scientists at Stanford University recently developed a method to store energy in ordinary paper by coating it with ink infused with carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires. These nanomaterials are great conductors because their one-dimensional structures move electricity efficiently. The result: lightweight, flexible batteries and capacitors.

Melting diamonds with lasers

Just how tough are diamonds? In a coordinated effort to determine exactly how diamonds react in extreme environ­ments, two teams of physicists blasted samples of the gem with powerful lasers—the Janus laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Omega laser at the University of Rochester. The lasers created shock waves of pressure 40 million times the Earth’s atmospheric pressure, melting the diamonds. The researchers then tweaked the lasers to gradually decrease the temperature and pressure to see when solid diamond would re-form. At 11 million times the pressure on Earth, pieces of diamonds began to appear on the surface of the liquefied carbon. The dual experiments lend credibility to a theory that gas giants like Uranus and Neptune have oceans of liquid carbon that are dotted with floating icebergs of diamonds. The data could also encourage more extreme industrial uses for diamonds.

Solar roof shingles

The complex installation of solar panels can be off-putting to many homeowners. To open the market to more people, Dow Chemical created thin-film photovoltaic solar panels that are the size and shape of ordinary asphalt shingles. Installation is easy: They can be nailed into the roof like conventional shingles. Plus, the solar shingles are healthier for homes than solar panels because they don’t use elaborate racking systems that penetrate a roof. Sales of the Powerhouse Solar Shingles are expected to begin late this year.

Stickiness with an on/off switch

Researchers at Cornell University have developed a way to produce instant adhesion that can be activated with a switch. The technique relies on surface tension produced by water droplets as they’re forced through microscopic holes. The charge from a 9-volt battery pumps water through the team’s device, creating a bond; reversing the voltage pulls droplets back through the holes and into a reservoir, releasing the surface. A 1000-hole prototype supports about 70 paperclips; a square-inch device with millions of small holes could support 15 pounds.

Bird-beak compasses are widespread

Many birds have nerve branches filled with iron in their upper beak, enabling them to navigate using the “feel” of Earth’s magnetic fields. German researchers confirmed that these specialized dendrites, first detected in homing pigeons, also exist in birds such as robins, warblers and even chickens, which don’t migrate. This suggests the extra sense appeared early in avian evolution.

A single ion tells time

A single aluminum ion, vibrating a quadrillion times a second, is the basis for a new “quantum logic” clock developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. A prototype of the clock remains accurate to within a second every 3.7 billion years—significantly better than the current U.S. civilian time standard, a cesium fountain clock accurate to within a second every 100 million years. The General Conference on Weights and Measures, based in France, may consider the design for a new international time standard. Such precise clocks are used to synchronize telecommunications networks and deep-space communications and to assist satellite navigation and positioning. They could also lead to new types of space-based gravity sensors, used to locate underground natural resources.

Hot chili grenade

The Indian military has weaponized the world’s hottest chili pepper, the bhut jolokia, or “ghost chili.” The infamous pepper rated at more than a million Scoville units, the scientific measurement of a chili’s heat. In comparison, jalapeño peppers max out at 8000 units. Compounds from the chili will be used in a hand grenade that, like tear gas, can overwhelm an aggressor.

Skin doubles as computer hardware

As portable electronics shrink, our fingers become too large to press tiny buttons and our eyes too weak to read small screens. A computer science Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University has come up with a novel solution: use the human body as a proxy. To work, the device projects a screen and keypad onto the skin. Piezoelectric vibration sensors detect taps and finger flicks and translate them into commands. A prototype of the “Skinput” system straps to the upper arm, but the researchers expect future versions to shrink to the size of a wristwatch.

Methane eaters on Mars?

A team of researchers working with the SETI Institute has found creatures in a desolate Arctic spring whose existence hints at a new kind of life that could possibly thrive on Mars. The water of Lost Hammer, a spring on Canada’s Axel Heiberg Island, contains bubbles of methane that steadily rise to the surface. While searching in the frozen pool for organisms that emit methane, the researchers instead found anaerobic bacteria that utilize methane as a source of energy and carbon. The spring’s mix of methane and ice mirrors past conditions on Mars, leading the team to speculate that similar life forms could have evolved there.

Airplanes can trigger rainstorms

Findings from the National Center for Atmospheric Research show that airplanes can trigger rain or snow simply by flying through clouds composed of supercooled water droplets. As the droplets pass over propellers or wings and into the cooler wake, they freeze and fall to the ground, creating distinctive “hole punch” clouds that are sometimes seen in the sky.

Rapid hands-free climbing device

Atlas Devices has created a climbing aid for the Navy that can hoist up to 500 pounds with the press of a button. Personnel can use the Power Ascender to quickly scale the hulls of vessels during boarding operations or to drop from helicopters without rescue booms. The rope weaves through the Ascender between rollers on a spindle: Rotate the spindle one way and the climber ascends; a button changes its direction for the descent. Rock climbers, look elsewhere—Atlas is only marketing the device to the military and to civilian first responders.

 

Makes me wonder what the weird science news of 2011 will be...