International Herald Tribune: Millions of students across Asia have been inconvenienced by the rupture of two undersea data transmission cables in Tuesday's earthquake in Taiwan. Because of the quake, Internet speeds remained slow — and in some areas nonexistent — in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, China, Singapore and South Korea. It is expected to take weeks to fully repair the links.
According to the IHT, Beijing's China Service Center for Scholarly Exchange, a company that helps prepare applications for students looking to study abroad, said that about 300 of its clients weren't able to file applications — including some facing a Jan. 1 deadline because of the disruption. Some students are using mobile phones to try and submit their applications to US universities.
The Independent: During the past year, scientific findings emerged that made even the most doom-laden predictions about climate change seem a little on the optimistic side. And at the heart of the issue is the idea of climate feedbacks - when the effects of global warming begin to feed into the causes of global warming. Feedbacks can either make things better, or they can make things worse. The trouble is, everywhere scientists looked in 2006, they encountered feedbacks that will make things worse - a lot worse.
WhirlView: The legislation that President Bush signed on the US India nuclear technology last week is not an agreement to trade nuclear technology. It waived the laws prohibiting trade with nations that have not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty says WhirlView. The bill also lays out a number of requirements that must be met before trade can take place.
What the president didn’t say during the signing ceremony was that he appended a signing statement that undermines changes Congress had made during the bill that strengthened oversight over an technology transfer. Michael Roston at Raw Story details what in the signing statement undermines the law.
Associated Press: Scientists have discovered that the Ayles Ice Shelf — all 41 square miles of it — broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic. The delay in reporting the news came about because satellite imagery of the area have only recently analysed.
Said Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, "This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years," Vincent said. "We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead."
NPR: Two teams of scientists have drawn up designs for a new nuclear warhead intended to replace the aging warheads on U.S. submarines. The scientists had to devise designs that they can guarantee will work without being tested.
The New York Times: Wind, almost everybody's best hope for big supplies of clean, affordable electricity, is turning out to have complications.
MSNBC: Satellite will look for rocky planets around other stars
NPR: The U.S. Geological Survey will soon upgrade its rapid earthquake notifications to include a projection of hazard to human beings and potential economic losses. Emergency officials are rapidly notified when a large quake strikes anywhere in the world. But it can take hours or days to figure out whether a particular quake is a major threat to life and property.
Bloomberg: France today will launch the first satellite dedicated to finding planets outside the solar system, the French National Center of Space Studies said.
NPR: The journal Science's "breakthrough of the year" for 2006 is the solution of a century-old math problem. The story behind the solution is quite a soap opera. It includes a Harvard math wizard, a reclusive Russian genius, a $1 million prize, an award-winning journalist and The New Yorker magazine.
International Herald Tribune: As Bulgaria prepares to join the European Union on Jan. 1, it is being forced to deliver on one last promise: to shut down two aging reactors at its only nuclear plant.
BBC: A strong undersea earthquake of magnitude 7.1 has struck off Taiwan, followed by a powerful aftershock, according to the US Geological Survey.
Ft.com: Iran condemned a U.N. sanctions resolution as “a piece of torn paper” that would not scare Tehran and vowed on Sunday to accelerate uranium enrichment work immediately.
The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Saturday to impose sanctions on Iran’s trade in sensitive nuclear materials and technology, in an attempt to stop uranium enrichment work that could produce material to be used in bombs.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said those who backed the U.N. resolution, drawn up by Britain, France and Germany but supported unanimously by the Security Council, would soon regret their “superficial act”.
space.com: Leonard David describes why the lunar south pole is considered to be such a promising candidate for a lunar outpost.
Guardian Unlimited: Astronomers have captured a vision of the cataclysmic fate which awaits our solar system in about five billion years' time. Observation of a star system some 450m light years from Earth has revealed all that remains of a planetary system located around a star that was once eight times the size of our Sun.
Science: Top nuclear scientists in the Indian government, speaking on condition of anonymity, have told Science that they oppose provisions of new U.S. legislation that paves the way for civilian nuclear cooperation between the two nations.
The Union-Tribune: Citing a lack of participation, the British journal Nature said Thursday it was ditching a closely watched online experiment that allowed scientists to comment on their peers' research before publication.
MSNBC: $2 million grant will give researchers a closer look at the galaxy's center
Monsters and Critics: A U.S.-led team of scientists has made the first experimental observations of rare particles of light emitted during the decay of neutrons.
MSNBC: Scientists say that some stars may bypass supernova phase completely
ScienceNow: School officials in Cobb County, Georgia, yesterday agreed to drop their 4-year attempt to tell high school biology students that evolution is only a "theory." Local school officials had fought a ruling by a federal judge to remove stickers that they had placed on textbooks, but yesterday, they threw in the towel, pledging to adhere to the state science curriculum and also to pay $167,000 in legal fees to the plaintiffs. In return, the five parents who brought the suit agreed to drop any further legal action against the school district.
Nature: Instrumentation problems leave relativity test in the balance.
The New York Times: Ambitious federal plans to repair the Gulf Coast and defend it against future hurricanes are coming under fire from many coastal scientists who say they would only perpetuate a costly and wrongheaded approach to storm management.
BBC: Airlines operating in the EU should pay for any increase in carbon emissions above current levels, the European Commission has proposed.
MSNBC: 55-acre lava delta may soon collapse into the Pacific Ocean
The Christian Science Monitor: At sundown on any given night, mountaintop turrets around the world rumble to life as astronomers train their telescopes on the sky. The quest: to write the history of the cosmos from clues they find in feeble starlight from the edge of the visible universe.
Space.com: Astronomers might have seen the very first stars in the universe. If so, these are incredible stars, some 1,000 times as massive as the Sun.
NPR: A Russian cargo plane took off from Germany this morning with a very unusual load: almost 600 pounds of highly enriched uranium. It was the biggest shipment ever in a joint U.S.-Russian program to keep nuclear material off the black market -- and out of the hands of terrorists.
The Boston Globe: Comets, the lonely wanderers of the solar system that some scientists think seeded Earth with the ingredients for life, are proving to be far more complex than anyone thought, containing a "zoo" of materials, including some compounds that appear to predate the sun.
The New York Times: Since the 1970s, women have surged into science and engineering classes in larger and larger numbers, even at top-tier institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where half the undergraduate science majors and more than a third of the engineering students are women. Half of the nation’s medical students are women, and for decades the numbers have been rising similarly in disciplines like biology and mathematics.
BBC: Westinghouse, the Japanese owned US nuclear-plant builder has won a $8 billion-dollar contract to build four AP1000 nuclear plants in China - two at Sanmen in Zhejiang province, with another two at Yangjiang in Guangdong.
The AP1000 reactor is an advanced pressurised water reactor and the Chinese plants should be operational by 2013. Under the agreement China will also obtain rights to build similar reactors itself as part of its plan to increase nuclear energy capacity from 1% to 5% of its energy market by 2020.
Washington Post: In a speech last week, Undersecretary of State Robert G. Joseph warned that other nations, and possibly terrorist groups, are "acquiring capabilities to counter, attack and defeat U.S. space systems." As a result, he said, the United States must increase its ability to protect vital space equipment with new technologies and policies. The speech was the first public discussion of the new US space policy that was announced in October. It makes clear that the administration would give the impression of reacting forcefully to any attempt to interfere with U.S. space technology -- whether used by the military or by businesses ranging from paging services and automated teller machines to radio and television providers.
Science: A scientific project that hopes to be a calming influence in the Middle East has instead increased tensions between two important countries in the region. At issue is the failure of 35 Iranian scientists to obtain Egyptian visas for a recent meeting in Alexandria of researchers hoping to work on the Synchrotron Light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) project.
Washington Post: Walter Pincus reports that in a recently released declassified version of a report on U.S. nuclear capabilities completed earlier this year, the Defense Science Board reported that its task force on the subject concluded "there is a need for a national consensus on the nature and role of nuclear weapons, as well as a new approach to sustaining a reliable, safe, secure and credible nuclear stockpile."
The task force found "most Americans agree that as long as actual or potential adversaries possess or actively seek nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, the United States must maintain a deterrent to counter possible threats and support the nation's role as a global power and security partner." Beyond that, however, it found "sharp differences."
Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project of the Federation of American Scientists, who first called attention to the science board's report, described it as an effort to "resell" the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review.
ScienceMatters@Berkeley: athleen M. Wong describes the research on gravitational wave detector by UC Berkeley professor Don Backer.
SciAm.com: Physicists have now analyzed the proposed mechanism linking a sense of smell with molecular vibrations and deemed it plausible. The new calculations by no means prove the theory, but they give it added legitimacy, says biophysicist and perfumer Luca Turin, who developed the idea. "Most people would probably feel that if it can be done at all, evolution has managed to make use of it." A paper explaining the research appears in Physical Review Letters.
Science: The Republican Congress adjourned last week without passing a 2007 budget for most federal agencies. The Democratic party, which won control of Congress last November has announced plans to apply current spending levels for the entire fiscal year. This decision will cause research cuts at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the in-house National Institute of Standards and Technology labs says Science.
Reuters: An examination of the first material plucked from a comet is forcing scientists to rethink the nature of the frigid emissaries from the deepest reaches of our solar system, as well as the early solar system itself.
Reporting their findings on Thursday, scientists who examined tiny grains retrieved by NASA's Stardust spacecraft from comet Wild 2 (pronounced "vilt") in 2004 found the comet, as expected, contained material from outside the solar system.
News.com: Former Vice President Al Gore, urged more than 5,000 scientists at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting to vociferously educate the public to the graveness of global warming. "I'm asking you very seriously to become much more active," Gore told researchers. "Get involved," he said, "because so much is at stake."
Zeenews: The European Southern Observatory has announced a 57 million euro investment into a 42-meter telescope that would be hundreds of times more sensitive that the best current optical and infrared telescopes. The European Extremely Large Telescope (not to be confused with the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope) would most likely cost 800 million euros to build and make extensive use of adaptive optics to combat atmospheric turbulence above the telescope. A final decision on whether to build the EELT will be taken in 2009.
BBC: Some 10,000 US researchers have signed a statement protesting about political interference in the scientific process.
Nature: How much momentum does light transfer to a material through which it passes? This is a surprisingly opaque matter, contested for almost a century, that is still the object of theory and experimentation.
ScienceNow: Six microsatellites launched last April are proving that a tiny fleet of spacecraft is as good--if not better--than traditional satellites at forecasting Earth's weather.
Cern Courier: Researchers at the Tevatron at Fermilab have found two new heavy particles and two of their excited states. The CDF collaboration has observed the first Σb particles, made up of quark combinations uub and ddb. Until now the Λb0 (udb) was the only baryon (three quark) state containing a b quark to have been observed.
Guardian Unlimited: Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was yesterday trying to fend off accusations of ineptitude and calls for his resignation after he accidentally acknowledged for the first time that Israel had nuclear weapons.
The New York Times: Scientists who are trying to develop molecular machines have spent a lot of time reinventing the wheel — literally making wheels and gears from just a few atoms. The eventual goal is to use such components in nanoscale devices that can do useful work inside living tissue, perhaps, or as part of a tiny nonelectronic computer.
Los Angeles Times: The Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn has found a mile-high mountain range on the giant moon Titan, scientists said Tuesday.
Wired: The search giant joins a growing trend by landscaping its headquarters' parking lots with pole-mounted panels that provide shade and generate clean power in one fell swoop.
Various: More than 100 coal fired power plants will be built over the next 20 years says NPR, and environmentalists are trying to make sure that CO2 emissions will not increase when these plants get built. The Serria Club has persuaded a town in Illionis (check spelling) to close two older coal fired power plants and get 25% of its electricity from wind power in order to stop suing the town over its plans to build a mid-size coal-fired power plant says NPR's Christopher Joyce. Other power companies are looking at carbon "credit" offsets says New York Times reporter Steve Iohr, in which companies are charged a cost for the pollution they produce. As the democrats will be controlling Congress there may even be federal regulation says Elizabeth Shogren and Steve Inskeep at NPR. However, the rise in greenhouse gases will most likely result in open artic seas during the summer by 2040, decades earlier than most scientists had predicted says a new paper by Marika M. Holland, Cecilia M. Bitz and Bruno Tremblay in Geophysical Letters. The open Artic sea will have a major impact on the environment, not only in the Artic, but in Europe and North America as well says Andrew Revkin.
MSNBC: The use of subatomic materials as microscopic building blocks for thousands of consumer products has turned into a big business so quickly that few are monitoring the so-called nanotechnology's effects on health and the environment.
ScienceNow: Nearly 25 years ago, astronomer Carl Sagan and other scientists predicted that a full-blown nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union would create a climate catastrophe on a global scale. Now, most of those same researchers have employed much more powerful climate models to show that even a limited conflict employing nuclear weapons would affect the world's weather for years and perhaps decades.
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