This is the fucking news.

Evidence of First Homosexual Caveman Found

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 05:13:00 -0700

Evidence of First Homosexual Caveman Found:

(via The Telegraph) The male body – said to date back to between 2900-2500BC – was discovered buried in a way normally reserved only for women of the Corded Ware culture in the Copper Age.

The skeleton was found in a Prague suburb in the Czech Republic with its head pointing eastwards and surrounded by domestic jugs, rituals only previously seen in female graves.

“From history and ethnology, we know that people from this period took funeral rites very seriously so it is highly unlikely that this positioning was a mistake,” said lead archaeologist Kamila Remisova Vesinova.

“Far more likely is that he was a man with a different sexual orientation, homosexual or transsexual,” she added.

According to Corded Ware culture which began in the late Stone Age and culminated in the Bronze Age, men were traditionally buried lying on their right side with their heads pointing towards the west, and women on their left sides with their heads pointing towards the east. Both sexes would be put into a crouching position.

The men would be buried alongside weapons, hammers and flint knives as well as several portions of food and drink to accompany them to the other side.

Women would be buried with necklaces made from teeth, pets, and copper earrings, as well as jugs and an egg-shaped pot placed near the feet.

Large Hadron Collider May Only Be Months Away from Finding a New Elementary Particle

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 20:50:00 -0700

Large Hadron Collider May Only Be Months Away from Finding a New Elementary Particle:

(via Wired) The studies focus on the top quark, the heaviest of the six quarks, which are the fundamental building blocks of nature. Top quarks appear to behave badly when they are produced during proton-antiproton collisions at a lower-energy particle accelerator, the Fermilab’s Tevatron in Batavia, Illinois.

Compared with what the standard model of particle physics predicts, these quarks fly off too often in the direction of the proton beam and not enough in the antiproton direction.

The Tevatron finding was first reported in 2008, but the results could have been due to chance. A recent report, using additional data, boosts confidence in the result, says Dan Amidei of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a member of the Tevatron’s CDF experiment. For energies above 450 billion electron volts, 45 percent of the top quarks travel along the path of the proton beam, while only 9 percent are expected to do so, Amidei and colleagues reported online January 3 at arXiv.org. The team reported additional evidence online March 10 of the top quark’s puzzling directional preference, after examining the paths of quarks generated by a different set of particle interactions.

There’s only about a 0.07 percent chance that the top quark’s apparent directional preference is a fluke, Amidei notes. Although that percentage still doesn’t meet the threshold for what physicists consider proof, the Tevatron’s other experiment, DZero, has recently found hints of the same asymmetry, using different data and techniques.

Assuming the effect is real, the directional preference suggests the existence of a new elementary particle, not predicted by the standard model. The particle could be the messenger of a new type of force that interacts with top quarks — along with their antiparticles — in such a way as to cause the asymmetry.

Scientists Grow Human Heart using Stem Cells, Breakthrough for Transplant Tech

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 05:15:09 -0700

Scientists Grow Human Heart using Stem Cells, Breakthrough for Transplant Tech:

(via DailyMail) Scientists are growing human hearts in laboratories, offering hope for millions of cardiac patients.

American researchers believe the artificial organs could start beating within weeks.

The experiment is a major step towards the first ‘grow-your-own’ heart, and could pave the way for livers, lungs or kidneys to be made to order.

The organs were created by removing muscle cells from donor organs to leave behind tough hearts of connective tissue.

Researchers then injected stem cells which multiplied and grew around the structure, eventually turning into healthy heart cells.

Dr Doris Taylor, an expert in regenerative medicine at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, said: ‘The hearts are growing, and we hope they will show signs of beating within the next weeks.

‘There are many hurdles to overcome to generate a fully functioning heart, but my prediction is that it may one day be possible to grow entire organs for transplant.’

Patients given normal heart transplants must take drugs to suppress their immune systems for the rest of their lives.

This can increase the risk of high blood pressure, kidney failure and diabetes.

If new hearts could be made using a patient’s own stem cells, it is less likely they would be rejected.

The lab-grown organs have been created using these types of cells – the body’s immature ‘master cells’ which have the ability to turn into different types of tissue. The experiment follows a string of successes for researchers trying to create spare body parts for transplants.

Scientists Claim Possibility That Life on Earth Originated on Mars

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 20:19:32 -0700

Scientists Claim Possibility That Life on Earth Originated on Mars:

(via MITnews) According to many planetary scientists, it’s conceivable that all life on Earth is descended from organisms that originated on Mars and were carried here aboard meteorites. If that’s the case, an instrument being developed by researchers at MIT and Harvard could provide the clinching evidence.

In order to detect signs of past or present life on Mars — if it is in fact true that we’re related — then a promising strategy would be to search for DNA or RNA, and specifically for particular sequences of these molecules that are nearly universal in all forms of terrestrial life. That’s the strategy being pursued by MIT research scientist Christopher Carr and postdoctoral associate Clarissa Lui, working with Maria Zuber, head of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), and Gary Ruvkun, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, who came up with the instrument concept and put together the initial team. Lui presented a summary of their proposed instrument, called the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Genomes (SETG), at the IEEE Aerospace Conference this month in Big Sky, Mont.

The idea is based on several facts that have now been well established. First, in the early days of the solar system, the climates on Mars and the Earth were much more similar than they are now, so life that took hold on one planet could presumably have survived on the other. Second, an estimated one billion tons of rock have traveled from Mars to Earth, blasted loose by asteroid impacts and then traveling through interplanetary space before striking Earth’s surface. Third, microbes have been shown to be capable of surviving the initial shock of such an impact, and there is some evidence they could also survive the thousands of years of transit through space before arriving at another planet.

So the various steps needed for life to have started on one planet and spread to another are all plausible. Additionally, orbital dynamics show that it’s about 100 times easier for rocks to travel from Mars to Earth than the other way. So if life got started there first, microbes could have been carried here and we might all be its descendants.

Pepsi Introduces Bottles Made Entirely of Plant Material

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:15:14 -0700

Pepsi Introduces Bottles Made Entirely of Plant Material:

(via Christian Science Monitor) PepsiCo Inc. unveiled a new bottle Tuesday made entirely of plant material that it says bests the technology of competitor Coca-Cola and reduces bottles’ carbon footprint.

The bottle is made from switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and other materials. Ultimately, Pepsi plans to also use orange peels, oat hulls, potato scraps and other leftovers from its food business.

The new bottle looks, feels and protects the drink inside exactly the same as its current bottles, said Rocco Papalia, senior vice president of advanced research at PepsiCo.

“It’s a beautiful thing to behold,” he said. “It’s indistinguishable.”

Theory Suggests Large Hadron Collider Could Be World's First Time Machine

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 18:58:02 -0700

Theory Suggests Large Hadron Collider Could Be World's First Time Machine:

(via ScienceDaily) If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider — the world’s largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year — could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time.

“Our theory is a long shot,” admitted Weiler, who is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University, “but it doesn’t violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.”

One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time.

According to Weiler and Ho’s theory, these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.

“One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes,” Weiler said. “Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future.”

Sperm Whales May Announce Themselves by Name

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 09:06:33 -0700

Sperm Whales May Announce Themselves by Name:

(via Wired) Subtle variations in sperm-whale calls suggest that individuals announce themselves with discrete personal identifier. To put it another way, they might have names.

The findings are preliminary, based on observations of just three whales, so talk of names is still speculation. But “it’s very suggestive,” said biologist Luke Rendell of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. “They seem to make that coda in a way that’s individually distinctive.”

Rendell and his collaborators, including biologists Hal Whitehead, Shane Gero and Tyler Schulz, have for years studied the click sequences, or codas, used by sperm whales to communicate across miles of deep ocean. In a study published last June in Marine Mammal Sciences, they described a sound-analysis technique that linked recorded codas to individual members of a whale family living in the Caribbean.

In that study, they focused on a coda made only by Caribbean sperm whales. It appears to signify group membership. In the latest study, published Feb. 10 in Animal Behavior, they analyzed a coda made by sperm whales around the world. Called 5R, it’s composed of five consecutive clicks, and superficially appears to be identical in each whale. Analyzed closely, however, variations in click timing emerge. Each of the researchers’ whales had its own personal 5R riff.

The differences were significant. The sonic variations that were used to distinguish between individuals in the earlier study depended on a listener’s physical relationship to the caller: “If you record the animal from the side, you get a different structure than dead ahead or behind,” said Rendell. But these 5R variations held true regardless of listener position.

“In terms of information transfer, the timing of the clicks is much less susceptible” to interference, said Rendell. “There is no doubt in my mind that the animals can tell the difference between the timing of individuals.” Moreover, 5R tends to be made at the beginning of each coda string as if, like old-time telegraph operators clicking out a call sign, they were identifying themselves. Said Rendell, “It may function to let the animals know which individual is vocalizing.”

Rendell stressed that much more research is needed to be sure of 5R’s function. “We could have just observed a freak occurrence,” he said. Future research will involve more recordings. “This is just the first glimpse of what might be going on.”

Professor Claims to Have Found Remnants of Lost City of Atlantis

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 13:10:15 -0800

Professor Claims to Have Found Remnants of Lost City of Atlantis:

(via ScienceDaily) Using satellite photography, ground-penetrating radar and underwater technology, a team of experts (led by University of Hartford professor and archaeologist Richard Freund) has been surveying marshlands in Spain to look for proof of the ancient city. If the team can match geological formations to Plato’s descriptions and date artifacts back to the time of Atlantis, we may be closer to solving one of the world’s greatest mysteries.

A new National Geographic Channel documentary, Finding Atlantis, which will be broadcast nationally on Sunday, March 13, at 9 p.m. ET/PT, follows a team of American, Canadian, and Spanish scientists as they employ satellite space photography, ground penetrating radar, underwater archaeology, and historical sleuthing in an effort to find a lost civilization.

When a space satellite photograph identified what looked like a submerged city in the midst of one of the largest swamps in Europe, the Doña Ana Park in southern Spain, Freund was contacted to see if he could assemble his team to apply their cutting-edge technology (electrical resistivity tomography, which is a virtual MRI for the ground, ground penetrating radar, and digital mapping that quickly and efficiently maps the subsurface of a site and provides instantaneous results for excavators to follow) to this project. In 2009 and 2010, they worked with Spanish archaeologists and geologists to explore the remains of an ancient city that goes back some 4,000 years.

…

The film journeys to Turkey and the Greek islands of Crete and Santorini before heading to southern Spain, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Plato says that Atlantis once faced a city called “Gadara,” which is the ancient name for modern Cadiz. Here, catamarans and dive boats take the viewer deep into the ocean off the coast of Spain, as a crack team of marine archaeologists and geologists employ sonar and scuba in search of sub-surface human-made structures dating back to the Bronze Age.

And in the vast mudflats of the Guadalquivir river delta, scientists examine strange geometric shadows of what look to be the remains of a ringed city. Here, geophysicists and archaeologists employ the most advanced imaging technologies in the world to determine whether or not an ancient cataclysm suddenly buried a thriving civilization under meters and meters of ocean and mud.

Finally, Finding Atlantis presents the viewer with what is quite possibly the most intriguing piece of archaeology ever associated with Atlantis. Recently discovered 2,800-year-old ruins display an image carved in stone of what looks to be an Atlantean warrior — guarding the entrance to the lost, multi-ringed city.

U.S. Department of Energy Announces New Biofuel to Replace Gasoline

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 08:13:00 -0800

U.S. Department of Energy Announces New Biofuel to Replace Gasoline:

(via CleanTechnica) Things are moving along at a nice clip in the world of biofuel research, so it seems like news of another “breakthrough” is barely enough to provoke a yawn. Well, this latest piece of news sure stands out from the crowd. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has just announced that a research team headed up by the Department’s BioEnergy Science Center has developed a cost effective method for converting woody plants straight into isobutanol, which can be used in conventional car engines just as gasoline.

In his announcement, Chu was quick to point out that biofuel production has the potential to create new jobs in rural parts of the country. Though some of those jobs might come from putting more farmland into production, the most important thing about DOE’s new isobutanol process is that it does not necessarily rely on new agricultural production. Aside from cultivated biofuel crops, it can use the woody waste from other crops including wheat and rice straw, corn stover, and lumber waste. Handling, transporting and refining these wastes is probably where a good deal of the new employment would occur.

Ambient Light Powered LCD Released by Samsung

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 17:52:00 -0800

Ambient Light Powered LCD Released by Samsung:

(via PhysOrg) [Samsung has] tweaked their existing transparent LCD technology, it is now energy efficient enough that it can be powered by ambient light alone. That’s right, just the light in the room, no cords and no batteries to replace.

A prototype of the technology was debuted at CeBIT 2011.

The prototype featured a 46-inch screen that supported full HD resolution video, at 1920x1080 pixels. The screen was also able to act as a full ten finger touchscreen. The company does have plans for commercial models in the works, but they were not too forthcoming with details such as when devices may be available or how much they will cost. This may have something to do with the fact that this technology is still in development. During the demo the touch screen did have some problems.

There are some rumors of Samsung using this technology to develop larger panels than the ones currently in existence. The biggest panels that the company currently releases is a 65-inch model.

NASA Scientist Claims to Have Found Evidence of Alien Life

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 10:23:00 -0800

NASA Scientist Claims to Have Found Evidence of Alien Life:

(via Yahoo! News) That astonishingly awesome claim comes from Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, who says he has found conclusive evidence of alien life — fossils of bacteria found in an extremely rare class of meteorite called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites. (There are only nine such meteorites on planet Earth.) Hoover’s findings were published late Friday night in the Journal of Cosmology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover, who has spent more than 10 years studying meteorites around the world, told FoxNews.com in an interview. “This field of study has just barely been touched — because quite frankly, a great many scientist would say that this is impossible.”

Hoover discovered the fossils by breaking apart the CI1 meteorite, and analyzing the exposed rock with a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to detect any fossil remains. What he found were fossils of micro-organisms, many of which he says are strikingly similar to those found on our own planet.

Libya Turns Off the Internet and the Massacres Begin

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 14:49:00 -0800

Libya Turns Off the Internet and the Massacres Begin:

(via ZDNet Blogs) First, Libya blocked news sites and Facebook. Then, beginning Friday night, according to Arbor Networks, a network security and Internet monitoring company, announced that Libya had cut itself off from the Internet. Hours later the Libyan dictator’s solders started slaughtering protesters. As of Sunday afternoon, U.S. Eastern time the death toll was above 200 in the city of Benghazi alone.

Welcome to 2011. While dictators in the most repressive regimes, such as North Korea and Cuba, have long kept Internet contact to the world to a bare minimum, less restrictive dictatorships, such as Egypt andLibya left the doors to the Internet cracked open to the public. Now, though, realizing that they could no longer hide their abuses from a world a Twitter tweet away, the new model autocracies, such as Libya and Bahrain have realized that they need to cut their Internet links before bringing out the guns.

As in Bahrain, Libya’s Internet is essentially owned and controlled by the government through a telecommunication company Libya Telecom & Technology. Its chairman is the dictator’s Moammar Gadhafi’s eldest son. Mobile phone services in Libya are also under the control of the government. So far though the government doesn’t seem to have cut international phone services off-perhaps because that’s harder to do without cutting off local telephone service.

Unlike Egypt or Bahrain though, Libya is the home domain of a well-known Internet service, the bit.ly URL tracking and shorting service. Bit.ly, which is operated by the U.S. company of the same name, is used in the popular social network client Tweetdeck. Bit.ly users won’t have anything to worry about though in the short run.

In a Quora, the social network answering service, response Bit.ly CEO John Borthwick, wrote, “Should Libya block Internet traffic, as Egypt did, it will not affect http://bit.ly or any .ly domain.”

Borthwick continued, “For .ly domains to be unresolvable the five .ly root servers that are authoritative *all* have to be offline, or responding with empty responses. Of the five root name-servers for the .ly TLD [Top Level Domain]: two are based in Oregon, one is in the Netherlands and two are in Libya.”

He then went to assure Bit.ly users that they “will continue to do everything we can to ensure we offer our users the best service we possibly can. That includes offering options around which top level domain you use. Many users choose to use http://j.mp/ as an alternative to http://bit.ly, given that it is shorter. And some use http://bitly.com.”

Of course, if Libya were to keep its Internet turned off for more than a few days, then the “ly” addresses will run into trouble. As Internet engineer Kim Davies explained on Quora, “It is a sense of false confidence to state that country-code domains are impervious to these kinds of government-mandated Internet shutdowns. If a country like Libya decides to shut down the Internet affecting the registry operations of .LY, while it is unlikely to have an immediate effect unless they explicitly empty the registry data, it can have a devastating effect in short order.”

“Borthwick states that because the authoritative servers (they are not root servers) for .LY are located outside the country it is safe, but the authoritative servers outside the country are reliant on being capable of obtaining updates from the .LY registry inside the country. If they are unable to succeed in getting updates, at some point they will consider the data they have stale and stop providing information on the .LY domain,” continued Davies.

“In the case of .LY, the absolute maximum for that is configured for 28 days (SOA [Start of Authority Record] expiry TTL [Time to Live] is 2419200 seconds). Without external intervention, the availability of .LY domains would be compromised somewhere between 0 and 28 days if the Libyan registry is cut off the Internet,” Davies concluded.

So, while bit.ly and other .ly Web sites and services that aren’t hosted in Libya won’t be seeing their TTL expiring anytime soon, eventually, if Libya were to stay off the Internet, they would die off.

Of course, the far more important issue is that while Libya keeps its Internet off, its government is trying to kill off its critics. The Internet silence that falls when an authoritative regime starts to slaughter its citizens is far more chilling than any subsidiary effect it might have on the global Internet.

Oral Sex Seen to Increase Risk of Cancer

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 14:44:33 -0800

Oral Sex Seen to Increase Risk of Cancer:

(via The Consumerist) Oral sex seems less safe in light of news that it could surpass tobacco as the main cause of oral cancer for Americans age 50 and under. Human papilloma virus, known as HPV, can be passed from genitals to mouths, and the presence of the virus can lead to oral cancer.

CNN speaks to a University of California, San Francisco professor of pediatrics who identifies oral sex as a major oral cancer risk factor for teens because the vast majority of oropharynx cancers, which grow in the middle of the throat, are caused by HPV.

She says:

“Adolescents don’t think oral sex is something to worry about. They view it as a way to have intimacy without having ‘sex.’”

The professor and fellow researches presented data that explains the risk at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Sunday. According to the Oral Cancer Foundation, 37,000 people are diagnosed with oral cancer each year.

Medical Clown Increases Pregnancy Rates with In-Vitro Fertilization, Study Finds

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 12:10:00 -0800

Medical Clown Increases Pregnancy Rates with In-Vitro Fertilization, Study Finds:

(via Time) A study of 229 Israeli women undergoing in-vitro fertilization (IVF) to treat infertility found that a 15-minute visit from a trained “medical clown” immediately after the embryos were placed in the womb increased the chance of pregnancy to 36%, compared with 20% for women whose embryo transfer was comedy-free.

After controlling for factors such as the women’s age, the nature and duration of their infertility, the number of embryos used and the day on which they were transferred into the uterus, researchers found an even greater effect of therapeutic laughter: the women who were entertained by a clown were 2.67 times more likely to get pregnant than those in the control group.

The quasi-randomized controlled study was published in one of the leading journals on infertility research, Fertility and Sterility, and led by Israeli researcher Shevach Friedler. It is considered only quasi-randomized because the timing of the recruitment of the control group was slightly different from that of the clown group.

…

It’s possible that the more relaxed a woman is when the embryos first enter the womb, the more likely they are to nestle in and grow successfully. In previous research, a Cochrane review of studies found, potentially stress-relieving acupuncture treatments done at the time of embryo transfer have nearly doubled pregnancy rates.

Barack Obama 2012 Budget Provides $8 Billion for Clean Energy

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 12:03:00 -0800

Barack Obama 2012 Budget Provides $8 Billion for Clean Energy:

(via The Guardian) President Barack Obama proposed on Monday to boost funds for clean energy research and deployment in his 2012 budget by slashing subsidies for fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal.

The budget provides the Department of Energy with $29.5bn (£18.4bn) for the fiscal year 2012, up 4.2% from the proposed 2011 budget, and up 12% from the enacted 2010 budget. Some $8bn would support research in clean energy like wind, solar and advanced batteries.

“Whomever leads in the global, clean energy economy will also take the lead in creating high-paying, highly skilled jobs for its people,” the administration said in the budget.

The budget would also provide $853m to support new nuclear energy technologies, such as small modular reactors.

The White House asked for $36bn in federal loan guarantees to help finance the building of nuclear power plants, as it did last year. The loan programme already has $18bn in authority.

To help pay for the clean energy initiatives, the White House is asking Congress to repeal $3.6bn in oil, natural gas and coal subsidies, a move that would total $46.2bn over a decade. In addition, the budget cuts funding for oil and gas research and for hydrogen fuels programmes.

But many Republicans oppose cutting subsidies for fossil fuels, saying it would hurt industries that provide jobs while the economy is still fragile.

“Given the broad difference in priorities between House Republicans and the White House on energy issues, we believe that few of the proposed cuts and expansions … will become law,” Whitney Stanco, an energy policy analyst at MF Global, said in a research note.

…

Republicans may try to force a government shutdown if the Obama administration does not agree to its spending cuts. But analysts said a delay in EPA climate regulations led by Congress was more likely than shutting down the government over an environmental rule.

The Obama budget cuts the 2012 EPA budget by about $1.3bn or about 13% with reductions in a clean diesel programme and in Great Lakes restoration projects.

Stanco said the budget’s funding for electric vehicles could be likeliest to make it into law as it could be paired with funding for natural gas vehicles. The budget proposes $588m for vehicle technologies, an increase of 88% from current levels.

The budget would double the number of energy innovation hubs to six to bring scientists to work on topics like rare earth elements, energy storage and batteries and development of smart grid technologies designed to make electricity transmission efficient.

Processed Food Diet in Early Childhood May Lower Subsequent IQ

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 16:01:08 -0800

Processed Food Diet in Early Childhood May Lower Subsequent IQ:

A diet, high in fats, sugars, and processed foods in early childhood may lower IQ, while a diet packed full of vitamins and nutrients may do the opposite, suggests research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

The authors base their findings on participants in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), which is tracking the long term health and wellbeing of around 14,000 children born in 1991 and 1992.

Parents completed questionnaires, detailing the types and frequency of the food and drink their children consumed when they were 3, 4, 7 and 8.5 years old.

Three dietary patterns were identified: “processed” high in fats and sugar intake; “traditional” high in meat and vegetable intake; and “health conscious” high in salad, fruit and vegetables, rice and pasta. Scores were calculated for each pattern for each child.

…

The results showed that after taking account of potentially influential factors, a predominantly processed food diet at the age of 3 was associated with a lower IQ at the age of 8.5, irrespective of whether the diet improved after that age. Every 1 point increase in dietary pattern score was associated with a 1.67 fall in IQ.

On the other hand, a healthy diet was associated with a higher IQ at the age of 8.5, with every 1 point increase in dietary pattern linked to a 1.2 increase in IQ. Dietary patterns between the ages of 4 and 7 had no impact on IQ.

The authors say that these findings, although modest, are in line with previous ALSPAC research showing an association between early childhood diet and later behaviour and school performance.

“This suggests that any cognitive/behavioural effects relating to eating habits in early childhood may well persist into later childhood, despite any subsequent changes (including improvements) to dietary intake,” they say.

Tianjin Eco-City In China: Possible Future of Urban Development

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 08:25:00 -0800

Tianjin Eco-City In China: Possible Future of Urban Development:

Tianjin Eco-City is a fascinating, 30 square kilometer development designed to showcase the hottest new green technologies and to serve as a model for future developing Chinese cities. Designed by Surbana Urban Planning Group, the city is being built just 10 minutes away from the business parks at the Tianjin Economic-Development Area, making for a commute that should be a breeze with the development’s advanced light rail transit system. Even cooler, the community’s expected 350,000 residents will be able to choose different landscapes ranging from a sun-powered solarscape to a greenery-clad earthscape to enjoy.

Eco-City will make use of the latest sustainable technologies such as solar power, wind power, rainwater recycling, and wastewater treatment/desalination of sea water. In order to reduce the city’s carbon emissions, residents will be encouraged to use an advanced light rail system, and China has also pledged that 90 percent of traffic within the city will be public transport. The development also features some beautiful public green spaces.

The city will be divided into seven distinct sectors – a Lifescape, an Eco-Valley, a Solarscape, an Urbanscape, a Windscape, an Earthscape and Eco-Corridors. Surrounded by greenery, the Lifescape will consist of a series of soil-topped mounds that will counteract the towering apartment buildings of the other communities. To the north of the Lifescape, the Solarscape will act as the administrative and civic center of the Eco-City. Demonstrating the concept of a compact, multilayered city, the Urbanscape will be the core of the Eco-City, featuring stacked programs interconnected by sky-bridges at multiple levels to make efficient use of vertical space. In contrast to the Urbanscape, the Earthscape will act as a sort of suburb of the city, with stepped architecture that will maximize public green space. Last but not least, the Windscape will transform Qingtuozi, a century-old village surrounded by a small lake, into a venue for citizens to relax and recreate.

…

In order to reduce the city’s carbon emissions, residents will be encouraged to use an advanced light rail system, and China has also pledged that 90 percent of traffic within the city will be public transport.

…

The city’s expected completion date is in 2020.

Climate Change to Continue to Year 3000 in Best Case Scenarios

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:54:00 -0800

Climate Change to Continue to Year 3000 in Best Case Scenarios:

New research indicates the impact of rising CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere will cause unstoppable effects to the climate for at least the next 1000 years, causing researchers to estimate a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet by the year 3000, and an eventual rise in the global sea level of at least four metres.

The study, to be published in the Jan. 9 advanced online publication of the journal Nature Geoscience, is the first full climate model simulation to make predictions out to 1000 years from now. It is based on best-case, ‘zero-emissions’ scenarios constructed by a team of researchers from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (an Environment Canada research lab at the University of Victoria) and the University of Calgary.

“We created ‘what if’ scenarios,” says Dr. Shawn Marshall, Canada Research Chair in Climate Change and University of Calgary geography professor. “What if we completely stopped using fossil fuels and put no more CO2 in the atmosphere? How long would it then take to reverse current climate change trends and will things first become worse?” The research team explored zero-emissions scenarios beginning in 2010 and in 2100.

The Northern Hemisphere fares better than the south in the computer simulations, with patterns of climate change reversing within the 1000-year timeframe in places like Canada. At the same time parts of North Africa experience desertification as land dries out by up to 30 percent, and ocean warming of up to 5°C off of Antarctica is likely to trigger widespread collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, a region the size of the Canadian prairies.

Researchers hypothesize that one reason for the variability between the North and South is the slow movement of ocean water from the North Atlantic into the South Atlantic. “The global ocean and parts of the Southern Hemisphere have much more inertia, such that change occurs more slowly,” says Marshall. “The inertia in intermediate and deep ocean currents driving into the Southern Atlantic means those oceans are only now beginning to warm as a result of CO2 emissions from the last century. The simulation showed that warming will continue rather than stop or reverse on the 1000-year time scale.”

Wind currents in the Southern Hemisphere may also have an impact. Marshall says that winds in the global south tend to strengthen and stay strong without reversing. “This increases the mixing in the ocean, bringing more heat from the atmosphere down and warming the ocean.”

Researchers will next begin to investigate more deeply the impact of atmosphere temperature on ocean temperature to help determine the rate at which West Antarctica could destabilize and how long it may take to fully collapse into the water.

Mice Kept on Unnatural Schedule Go Haywire

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:46:00 -0800

Mice Kept on Unnatural Schedule Go Haywire:

Artificially separated from a natural cycle of light and dark, the bodies and brains of mice go haywire in ways that may mimic the human effects of circadian disruption.

The mice are not an analogue for humans who work a night shift or regularly travel across multiple time zones, but they could provide a model for deeper investigations of what happens when circadian rhythms are bumped.

After all, it’s only been a century since mechanized timekeeping and artificial lighting made it possible to override a biological system calibrated for the last several billion years, with circadian systems found in even the most primitive algae.

“Modern society has resulted in a round-the-clock lifestyle, in which natural connections between rest-activity cycles and environmental light-dark cycles have been degraded or even broken,” wrote researchers led by neuroscientist Bruce McEwen of Rockefeller University in a Dec. 11 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study. “However, the ramifications of chronic disruption of the circadian clock for mental and physical health are not understood.”

Yet if the effects are not understood in exact detail, a growing body of evidence points to problems. Circadian “clock genes,” centrally controlled in mammals by a brain region that gets signals straight from the retina, have central regulatory roles in gene networks. Hormone-balance signals are tied to circadian cycles, and night-shift work has been correlated with increases in diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Such correlations can flag a problem but don’t say much about how it works, sending researchers to work on animals. To create chronic circadian disturbance, McEwen’s team turned lab lights on and off to create 20-hour days for mice, while a control group was kept on a regular 24 hour schedule. Within six weeks, the disrupted group started to gain weight, despite eating the same diet as controls. They grew obese, and had altered levels of insulin and leptin, two key metabolic hormones.

Newly Developed Glass is Stronger and Tougher Than Steel

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:36:00 -0800

Newly Developed Glass is Stronger and Tougher Than Steel:

A new type of damage-tolerant metallic glass, demonstrating a strength and toughness beyond that of any known material, has been developed and tested by a collaboration of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)and the California Institute of Technology. What’s more, even better versions of this new glass may be on the way.

“These results mark the first use of a new strategy for metallic glass fabrication and we believe we can use it to make glass that will be even stronger and more tough,” says Robert Ritchie, a materials scientist who led the Berkeley contribution to the research.

The new metallic glass is a microalloy featuring palladium, a metal with a high “bulk-to-shear” stiffness ratio that counteracts the intrinsic brittleness of glassy materials.