August 2007 Archives
Xinhua: Albert Einstein and science fiction writers predicted the warping of space-time around neutron stars, the most dense observable matter in the universe, and now there is proof.
Wired: A team of Italian scientists says their latest nanotech discovery is the secret to the wall-scaling Spiderman suit.
Guardian Unlimited: Secret papers reveal post-war campaign to loot military and commercial assets
Reuters: Greenhouse gas emissions -- not El Nino or other natural phenomena -- pushed U.S. temperatures for 2006 close to a record high, government climate scientists reported on Tuesday.
Xinhua: Chinese lawmakers are legislating for the first time to allow scientists to report failures during the process of innovation without blotting their records in future funding applications.
USA Today: Solar power has long been the Mercedes-Benz of the renewable energy industry: sleek, quiet, low-maintenance.
BBC: It is a commonly held belief that Jupiter shields Earth from comets or asteroids that might otherwise hit us.
VNUNet.com: Scientists have published a new theory which describes how the transistors in next-generation quantum computers may be created.
Reuters: Russia's state security service said on Friday it had dropped an investigation into two scientists suspected of disclosing state secrets in a book to commemorate the anniversary of their institute.
Xinhua: leading plasma physicist testified Friday on international collaboration for building the world's first experimental fusion reactor at the Chinese legislature.
The Washington Post: After two years of painstaking negotiations, a historic nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and India appears to be unraveling as a broad spectrum of political parties calls on the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to scrap the deal, saying it limits the country's sovereignty in energy and foreign policy matters.
The Daily Telegraph: Scientists are planning a mission to drill beneath the Moon's surface for buried meteorites that may hold clues to how life began on Earth.
Telelegraph.co.uk: Astronomers are scratching their heads over a puzzling non-discovery, an enormous hole in the universe measuring nearly a billion light-years across.
The New York Times: Los Angeles appears to be in a centuries-long seismic lull between periods of powerful earthquake activity, while communities inland could be at higher risk of big quakes.
Science: Two key science agencies have issued policy directives this month that emphasize the role of investigators in helping postdocs grow into independent researchers.
Reuters: A historic nuclear energy deal between India and the United States is hanging in the balance due to political opposition in New Delhi, but could still be saved if it reaches the U.S. Congress early next year, analysts said.
ScienceNow: A huge tank of liquid buried deep in the Italian Apennine mountains has made the first accurate measurement of low-energy neutrinos coming from the heart of the sun. The results generally confirm physicists' theories of how the sun's nuclear furnace generates its heat and support recent findings about the strange nature of neutrinos.
The Christian Science Monitor: A tweak to NASA’s record shows that 4 of the 10 warmest years in the USoccurred during in the 1930s, not more recently. Climate change deniers say this points out that concern over global warming is unfounded.
MSNBC: Some scientists worry about Cassini orbiter’s flyby of Enceladus
Nature: When measuring photons, it's a case of 'wanted, dead' — catching them alive is not an option. But we can observe how a superposition of many photon waves progressively collapses as it interacts with a beam of atoms.
ABC News: Iran, IAEA Agree on Nuclear Timetable, but U.S. Criticizes Accord
Miami Herald: A three-year veil of secrecy in the name of national security was used to keep the public in the dark about the handling of highly enriched uranium at a nuclear fuel processing plant - including a leak that could have caused a deadly, uncontrolled nuclear reaction.
MSNBC: ‘Standard model’ leaves out gravity and turns wonky at high energies
BBC: The constellations of Andromeda, Hydra and Vulpecula are now just a mouse click away for amateur star-gazers, following the launch of Google Sky.
Space.com: A giant underground experiment has given researchers their first glimpse into the heart of the sun and the subatomic particles that shine down on Earth everyday.
Environmental News Network: Emissions of a key air pollutant fell slightly in China in the first half of the year but water quality worsened, the country's environmental watchdog said Tuesday, urging tougher measures to deal with a grim pollution situation.
BBC: Astronomers have spotted a space oddity in Earth's neighbourhood - a dead star with some unusual characteristics.
Slate.com: If economics can tell us something useful about crime, marriage, or carpooling—as I believe it can—then other academic disciplines should have something to tell us about economies. Last month, Science published an example that may turn out to be important. Two physicists, Cesar Hidalgo and Albert-László Barabási, and two economists, Bailey Klinger and Ricardo Hausmann, have been drawing unusual pictures of economic "space" that promise a deeper understanding of the biggest question in economics: why poor countries are poor.
Chicago Tribune: A proposed $500 million particle accelerator could help it land an even bigger project
The Register: It is 21 years since the nuclear plant at Chernobyl went bang, and the extent of the damage wrought by the radioactive fallout is still becoming clear.
Science: Astronomer Arthur Eddington's prophetic quote about the universe still holds: It is stranger than we can imagine. And new images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory combined with views from two ground-based optical telescopes have produced one of the biggest cosmic mysteries yet. A collision between giant galactic clusters seems to have separated the galaxies from their dark matter cores. The find threatens to turn current thinking about dark matter on its ear.
NPR: In southern France, researchers from around the globe are building a massive machine that will recreate fusion. That's where two atoms become one, and release energy. Researchers say this new machine will come close to their final goal: a fusion power plant that generates electricity.
Iraq is "the closest thing that any of us have seen to the Holocaust in terms of attacks on science and learning", said Allan Goodman, president and chief executive of the non-profit International Institute of Education, which administers the fund.
"It is not even clear who is doing it," said Dr Jarecki, the fund's chairman.
Energy Firms Plan New Nuclear Power Plants
Concerns Linger for 2020 Nuclear Dump Openingt
NPR: Even without big-name makers of electric cars, there are some big names driving them: Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Clooney both bought the all-electric Roadster sports car. It goes from zero to 60 miles per hour in four seconds, and charges from a household plug.
BBC: Minuscule wind engines could help to take computing power to the next level, scientists believe.
San Francisco Chronicle: Why he's quitting: Dynes says he wants to spend more time with wife of 5 months
USA Today: Electrically charged specks of interstellar dust organize into DNA-like double helixes and display properties normally attributed to living systems, such as evolving and reproducing, new computer simulations show
The New York Times: Gino Segre followed the family tradition of becoming a physicist, but then turned to writing science history for a broader audience.
BBC: Flexible paper batteries could meet the energy demands of the next generation of gadgets, says a team of researchers.
Wired: U.S. military robots ran 30,000 missions in 2006 -- hunting for, and getting rid of, improvised explosives. Now, the military has launched a crash project to radically increase its unmanned ground forces. Call it the robotic equivalent of the "surge."
The Age: There is a case for supplying uranium to India, but only in accordance with a revised globalnon-proliferation regime.
Salon.com: Turkish-American physicist Taner Edis explains why science in Muslim lands remains stuck in the past -- and why the Golden Age of Mesopotamia wasn't so golden after all.
The New York Times: Global warming is by nature a big-enough problem to create the kind of necessity that could be mother, father and midwife to invention. And plenty of big ideas are out there to address it, some that may even lead to substantial enterprises much as our military needs have.
Science: Astronomers have discovered five full-sized galaxies in the extremely distant--and therefore extremely young--universe. The galaxies, which are forming stars very rapidly, are big for their age, meaning that astronomers might have to rethink current ideas about galaxy formation.
Sacramento Bee : Scientists from Davis contribute to gigantic project in Europe
Wired: President Bush signed the America COMPETES ACT -- which authorizes funding for certain high-risk, high-reward research -- into law today. The law also creates a new Advanced Research Projects Administration for Energy (ARPA-E) with three overriding goals: reduce foreign energy imports, reduce greenhouse gas and other emissions, and improve energy efficiency.
Science: Last week, as part of a mammoth innovation bill (see related story), Congress created the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy that would, as the legislation explains, identify and fund "transformational technological advances that industry by itself is not likely to undertake."
The New York Times: The area of floating ice in the Arctic has shrunk more this summer than in any other summer since satellite tracking began in 1979, and it has reached that record point a month before the annual ice pullback typically peaks, experts said yesterday.
Telegraph.co.uk: Here is the climate forecast for the next decade; although global warming will be held in check for a few years, it will come roaring back to send the mercury rising before 2014.
BBC: When engineers flick the switch to turn on the world's fastest supercomputer later this year it will be capable of chewing its way through 1,000 trillion calculations every second.
Forbes:
University of Illinois officials said they still don't know if the school will be home to a new supercomputer intended to be the world's fastest, despite a news report saying the decision had been made.
Nature: India's new Ministry of Earth Sciences is at the helm of ambitious plans to advance deep-sea and polar research. K. S. Jayaraman reports.
Wired: Price drops for semi-pro astronomy gear have put some impressive equipment in the hands of astrophotographer hobbyists. Here you'll meet some of the best DIY astrophotographers in this growing subculture.
USA Today: The disaster caused by the collapse of one of this city's highway bridges points to the need for better technologies to inspect bridges, but states have been slow to spend money on the new methods, national safety and engineering experts said Monday.
The Christian Science Monitor: They reign supreme in checkers and chess. Poker may be next. What other areas will artificial intelligence soon dominate?
Los Angeles Times: The efforts of the Swedish scientist now allow for assays of corrosion of metal surfaces, identification of contaminants and many other applications.
Environmental News Network: A U.S. summit in September on climate change, one of at least four international meetings set for this year, is already raising doubts about any action being taken before President Bush leaves office.
Telegraph.co.uk: Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists.
The New York Times: The biggest name-dropper in science, Albert Einstein, mentioned God often enough that one could imagine he and the "Old One" had a standing date for coffee or tennis.
The Boston Globe: The British soccer player David Beckham is famous for many things. His hairstyles (there's a website that allows you to view yourself with 13 of his distinct do's); his fashion choices (the British tabloids just loved his male sarong and pink nail polish); and his marriage to a pop star, Victoria Beckham -- Posh Spice of the Spice Girls.
And then there's his soccer fame, which is largely based on his innate command of the laws of physics.
AZoNano.com: Northeastern University Physics professor Sergey V. Kravchenko along with colleagues Svetlana Anissimova (Northeastern University), A Punnoose (City College if the City University of New York), AM Finkelstein (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) and TM Klapwijk (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands), has published an important new paper in the August issue of Nature Physics which answers a long standing question in the field of condensed matter physics.
USA Today: Malicious, vindictive and mean-spirited. These are words that might surface in divorce court.
But they have been lobbed in the course of a different estrangement: the standoff between the Bush administration and the nation's scientific community.
CNET: At Los Alamos National Lab, scientists are working on ways to keep the world safe from weapons of mass destruction
The New York Times: The National Science Foundation is planning to award I.B.M. a contract to build the world’s fastest supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, according to documents that were accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week
BBC: A team of UN nuclear experts has begun a four-day inspection of a Japanese atomic power plant damaged in a powerful earthquake last month.
Various: Both NPR and the Christian Science Monitor report on today's launch of Phoenix, a Mars probe that will look for evidence of cliamte change and organic compounds at the Martian polar caps. It will be the first soft landing on Mars by NASA in more than 30 years. All being well, the probe will arrive at Mars in May next year.
Science: Researchers have used a novel light-splitting technique to achieve an unofficial record of 42.8% efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity.
The Washington Post: A team of experts from the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency will inspect next week the Japanese nuclear power plant damaged in an earthquake, after pressure from local authorities in the area worried about safety.
CNET: I'm standing in the middle of "the center of the known universe," as this room is sometimes called. And in a way, it feels like that's actually where I am.
That's because I'm in the control center of the Very Large Array, a collection of 27 dish antennas, each of which weighs 230 tons and has a diameter of 25 meters. Together, the antennas form the world's largest radio telescope.
Renewable Energy Access: University of Delaware-led team sets solar cell record, joins DuPont on $100 million project
The New York Times: Alarmed at recent indications of climate change here in the Amazon and in other regions of Brazil, the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has begun showing signs of new flexibility in the tangled, politically volatile international negotiations to limit human-caused global warming.
Nature: When two 'bits' of magnetic information race around a nanoscale wire, two factors determine whether or not they survive the course: the condition of the track, and how fast they respond to the starting signal.
International Herald Tribune: Foreign ministers of the countries involved in talks on North Korea's nuclear program reaffirmed their commitment to resolve the dispute in a meeting with Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, an official said Wednesday.
Photonics.com: Workers could face a health threat -- in some cases, on par to that of cigarette smoking -- from office laser printers that emit large amounts of tiny particles into the air. Potential effects range from respiratory irritation to effects on the cardiovascular system and cancer, said Professor Lidia Morawska from the Queensland University of Technology, as reported in Australia's ABC Science Online.
Wired: The Hubble Space Telescope is 17 years old — that's like 150 to you and me. Next year, the geriatric orbiting eye will receive its final tune-up, and soon it will go live on a farm where it can play with other obsolete space-based observatories. The good news is that NASA scientists have already cooked up a replacement. The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for a 2013 launch, folds to fit into the cone of a rocket for deeper deployment than its predecessor. Once in orbit, it will capture infrared instead of visible light and — since distance equals time in space — will be able to see back to about 400 million years after the big bang. That should let it snag shots of the first bright objects, the origins of planetary systems, and the assembly of galaxies. "Every time you get new capabilities, you see a quantum jump in progress," says Mark Clampin, the observatory's project scientist. "I'm sure we'll discover things we've never seen before."
The New York Times: Workers are trying to determine how to clean up one of the worst radioactive waste leaks in years at the Hanford nuclear reservation, officials said.
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