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Education

Submission + - Fetid Fish Revise Understanding of Fossil Formatio (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by grrlscientist
grrlscientist writes: A team of paleontologists from the University of Leicester devised a new method for extracting information from 500 million year old fossils: they studied the rate and sequence of decomposition for individual physical features to better understand how our ancient fish-like ancestors might have originally looked. The team's data revealed a surprisingly consistent pattern of decomposition throughout time. This pattern shows that as these modern fish decayed, the most recently evolved features — those characters that are most informative because they distinguish closely related animals within the same lineage — rotted first. The last features to disappear were more ancient; those that are shared by all vertebrates, such the notochord. These findings indicate that some of the earliest vertebrate fossils may have been more evolutionarily advanced than previously thought.
Science

Submission + - Decreased Water Vapor Has Offset Global Warming (nature.com) 4

Submitted by
quaith
quaith writes: "Nature reports that a team led by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration describe how a mysterious 10% drop in water vapor in the stratosphere since 2000 could have offset the expected warming due to greenhouse gases. The calculated offset is roughly 25%. The team's model also suggests that an increase in water vapor might have boosted earlier warming by about 30% in the 1980s and 1990s. This drop in atmospheric water vapor is now on the list of possible culprits causing average global temperatures to flatten out over the past decade, despite increasing greenhouse-gas emissions."
Science

Submission + - New Bird-Like Theropod Found in China (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by quaith
quaith writes: A report by GrrlScientist on a just published article in Science describes a new fossil theropod from the early Late Jurassic. Theropods are the group of meat-eating dinosaurs that include velociraptors and Tyrannosaurus Rex. GrrlScientist says in her post "Currently, most scientists think that birds are modern dinosaurs, but because small hollow bones like those of birds and small dinosaurs don't fossilize well, the early fossil record for birds is sparse." This fossil, found in China's Gobi Desert, is a three-dimensionally preserved nearly complete skeleton. It has has features of both dinosaurs and birds and strengthens the dinosaur-bird hypothesis.
Science

Submission + - Wearable rubber films could power electronics (princeton.edu)

Submitted by quaith
quaith writes: Princeton researchers have published a paper that describes power-generating rubber films that could harvest the energy of walking, running and breathing to power mobile electrical devices. The material is composed of nanoribbons of lead zirconate titanate (PZT), a ceramic material that is piezoelectric. These are then embedded into silicone rubber sheets. The resulting material is highly efficient at converting mechanical energy provided by flexing into electrical energy. The researchers suggest it could be used in shoes, or placed against the lungs. I'd certainly buy a t-shirt that could power my laptop.
Science

Submission + - Evolving robots learn to prey on each other (plosbiology.org)

Submitted by quaith
quaith writes: Dario Floreano and Laurent Keller report in PLoS ONE how their robots were able to rapidly evolve complex behaviors such as collision-free movement, homing, predator versus prey strategies, cooperation, and even altruism. A hundred generations of selection controlled by a simple neural network were sufficient to allow robots to evolve these behaviors. Their robots initially exhibited completely uncoordinated behavior, but as they evolved, the robots were able to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate. The authors point out that this confirms a proposal by Alan Turing who suggested in the 1950s that building machines capable of adaptation and learning would be too difficult for a human designer and could instead
be done using an evolutionary process. The robots aren't yet ready to compete in Robot Wars, but they're still pretty impressive.
News

Submission + - Does Physics win if Hawking loses bet? (edgeofphysics.com)

Submitted by ssriram
ssriram writes: Nice blog post (by the author of the same article in New Scientist), about the bet between Hawking and Neil Turok about whether inflation occurred or not.

btw, has anyone here read the book "The Edge of Physics" from the same site? The blog seems like a companion to the book. From the previews on Amazon, the table of contents and the first chapter make for really interesting, lay reading.

Submission + - Buy Thor for $10,000 and the Ark of Truth for $5K (stargateartifacts.com)

Submitted by will_die
will_die writes: Propworx after all the recent auctions for their Battlestar Galactica props are now selling off 15 years of Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis props. Over the next couple of months minor items will be sold off on ebay and the major items will be sold off in two live auctions.
Ebay auctions will consist of smaller props, most costumes, drawing and even parts of stargates. The live auctions will contain items such as the Thor puppet, The Ark of Truth and the only fully working Stargate*.

*Multiple Stargates needed for travel.
Science

Submission + - Making it hard for extraterrestrials to hear us (guardian.co.uk) 2

Submitted by quaith
quaith writes: US astronomer Frank Drake has told scientists at a special SETI meeting in London that earthlings are making it less likely that we will be heard in space. In the past, we used huge ground stations to broadcast radio and television signals which could be picked up relatively easily, according to astronomers calculations anyway. Now we use satellites that transmit at 75 watts and point toward Earth instead of into space. In addition, we've switched to digital which makes the transmissions even fainter. Drake has concluded that very soon, in space no one will hear us at all. I guess we'd better keep listening.
Science

Submission + - The Twisted Evolution of the Duck Penis (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by quaith
quaith writes: In Science Blogs Neurotopia, Scicurious describes "the twisted evolution of the duck penis". She describes an original study by Brennan, Clark, and Prum published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Ducks are one of the few types of birds to have a penis, and it seems to be the product of antagonistic co-evolution, or "sex one-upmanship." The female's oviduct has lots of blind ends and pouches, making it easy for the male's penis to get stuck in the wrong place. In return, the male's penis is flexible, allowing him to bend around and try to get through the twists and turns. This is illustrated with slow-motion motion video capture, including one where the penis goes into a spiral glass tube. The net result of the antagonistic evolution is that the males can't get very far in so they deliver the sperm where it's needed, near the cloaca.
Idle

Submission + - Republicans and Democrats do look different. (plosone.org)

Submitted by quaith
quaith writes: It's not the way they dress, but the appearance of their face. A study published in PLoS One by Nicholas O. Rule and Nalini Ambady of Tufts University used closely cropped greyscale photos of people's faces, standardized for size. Undergrads were asked to categorize each person as either a Democrat or Republican. In the first study, students were able to different Republican from Democrat senate candidates. In the second, students were able to differentiate the political affiliation of other college students. Accuracy in both studies was about 60% — not perfect, but way better than chance.
Space

Submission + - NASA concedes defeat in effort to free rover

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The US space agency NASA has conceded defeat in its battle to free the Spirit rover from its Martian sand trap. The vehicle became stuck in soft soil back in May last year and all the efforts to extricate it have failed. NASA says Spirit, which landed on the Red Planet ver six years ago, "no longer be a fully mobile robot," and has instead designated the once-roving scientific explorer a stationary science platform.
Microsoft

Submission + - One day later, Microsoft investigates new IE flaw

Submitted by Eugen
Eugen writes: A day after releasing an out-of-band security bulletin for a vulnerability in Internet Explorer notably exploited in the recent series of Chinese-based attacks against Google and 30 other tech companies, new flaws have been discovered in Microsoft's browser.

Boston-based research firm Core Security Technologies has outlined a set of vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer that hackers can link together to remotely exploit a Windows PC. None of the vulnerabilities are serious enough to compromise a machine alone, but a hacker could take control of a PC by exploiting all of them at once. "There are three or four ways to conduct this type of attack," Jorge Luis Alvarez Medina, a security consultant with Core, told Reuters, though he admitted he was uncertain whether any hackers had already exploited his findings.

"Microsoft is investigating a responsibly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. "We're currently unaware of any attacks trying to use the vulnerability or of customer impact, and believe customers are at reduced risk due to responsible disclosure."
Idle

Submission + - Peeing In Space (scientificblogging.com)

Submitted by ghostlibrary
ghostlibrary writes: Astronaut Chris Hadfield has a great description of peeing & pooping in space-- always a popular topic-- and a surprising revelation on shooting stars. Since this question always gets asked when I speak at classrooms, this video is a keeper. For those who can't watch vids at work, etc, I wrote up a transcript, but I recommend watching it, as his delivery is great.
http://www.scientificblogging.com/daytime_astronomer/peeing_space

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