Science News
Does altitude affect the way language is spoken?
Earth & Climate
Language is formed by giving meaning to sounds and stringing together these meaningful expressions to communicate feelings and ideas. Until recently most linguists believed that the relationship between the structure of language and the natural world was mainly the influence of the environment on vocabulary. Now, a new study published in the June 12 edition of PLOS ONE shows that there is a link between geographical elevation and the way language is spoken. The study reveals that languages containing ejective consonants are spoken mainly in regions of high elevation. Ejectives are sounds produced with an intensive burst of air, and are not found in the English language.
The findings show that 87 percent of the languages with ejectives included in the study are located within 500 km of a region of high elevation on all continents. The findings also indicate that as elevation increases, so does the likelihood of languages with ejectives.
"This is really strong evidence that geography does influence phonology—the sound system of languages," says Caleb Everett, associate professor of anthropology, in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami and author of the study. The study is titled "Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The case of ejectives."
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Supreme Court Rejects Patents on Two Naturally Occurring Genes
By Dina Fine Maron
When Angelina Jolie announced last month that she decided to get a prophylactic double mastectomy, she based her decision on the presence of the BRCA1 gene in her body—a gene that was detected via a costly medical test.
The Supreme Court today unanimously struck down patents on BRCA1 and BRCA2—two genes linked to hereditary forms of breast and ovarian cancer—when the genes occur in the body. Myriad did not create or alter any of the genetic information of the BCRA1 and BRCA2 genes, and thus does not satisfy patenting requirements, according to the decision. “Myriad discovered the precise location and sequence of what are now known as the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court.
This ruling could lead to cheaper tests for individuals who may be at increased risk of developing cancer. If Myriad Genetics were allowed to hold exclusive patents on these genes, the company would have maintained sole rights to create medical tests that indicate whether an individual has mutations that would lead to elevated risk of developing these cancers.
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Technology News
Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance
By Moxie Marlinspike
Suddenly, it feels like 2000 again. Back then, surveillance programs like Carnivore, Echelon, and Total Information Awareness helped spark a surge in electronic privacy awareness. Now a decade later, the recent discovery of programs like PRISM, Boundless Informant, and FISA orders are catalyzing renewed concern.
The programs of the past can be characterized as “proximate surveillance,” in which the government attempted to use technology to directly monitor communication themselves. The programs of this decade mark the transition to “oblique surveillance,” in which the government more often just goes to the places where information has been accumulating on its own, such as email providers, search engines, social networks, and telecoms.
Both then and now, privacy advocates have typically come into conflict with a persistent tension, in which many individuals don’t understand why they should be concerned about surveillance if they have nothing to hide. It’s even less clear in the world of “oblique” surveillance, given that apologists will always frame our use of information-gathering services like a mobile phone plan or Gmail as a choice.
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Real-Life Electric Jedi Hover-Bike Takes Off in Prague
By Keith Barry
A flying electric bicycle made its first public voyage around a Prague convention center this week, taking off with a dummy on board and hovering in the air like a budget speeder bike from Star Wars.
The Design Your Dreams Flying Bike is the product of three Czech engineering firms who joined together to fulfill a shared childhood dream, and the result has been a year in the making. We first told you about Design Your Dreams last June, when the e-bike was still on the drawing board. Now, their first prototype has taken to the air, and it looks amazing.
Six horizontally mounted propellers lifted the 220-pound electric bike into the air, while an engineer on the ground controlled it with a handheld remote. According to Milan Duchek of Design Your Dreams, the prototype will fly remotely with a dummy on the seat for now, but a version that can be piloted by a human will be ready this fall.
While the prototype isn’t as sleek as the drawings we originally saw, the project is still in very early stage development. Most parts came right off the shelf, and the total project cost in the low five figures.
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Environmental News
Antarctic's Ice Shelves Melting From the Bottom Up
Ice shelves lose more mass where the ice meets the sea than previously thought.
Jane J. Lee
Antarctica's ice shelves are losing it.
Conventional wisdom holds that ice shelves—the seaward extension of glaciers on land—lose most of their mass by shedding icebergs. But new research finds that there's another weight-loss program at work—many of Antarctica's ice shelves are melting away from the bottom up.
Glacier experts have known for years that ice shelves melt at the boundary between the ice and the sea. But previous studies have only looked at individual glaciers and ice shelves in Greenland and Alaska, said Erin Pettit, a glacier expert at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who was not involved in the new research.
A study published today in the journal Science has gone beyond those individual observations and found that about 55 percent of the mass lost from ice shelves in Antarctica is through melting at the ice-ocean boundary.
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American West Becoming Increasingly Dusty
The number of dust storms is rising. What does that mean?
Ker Than
The American West is becoming an increasingly dusty place: So-called "dust emissions"—including giant dust storms reminiscent of the Dust Bowl era—have increased in the past 17 years, according to a new study.
Scientists understand only some of the reasons for the surge.
"About half of the changes [we see] are due to drought and high-wind events. We're seeing more of these larger storms that can move dust," said Jason Neff, a geological scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a co-author of the study. "The other half [of dust storms we see remains] unexplained, but candidates include off-road vehicle use, oil and gas development, urban and rural development, and grazing."
In the new study, published online in the journal Aeolian Research, Neff and his team calculated the amount of dust blowing across the United States by estimating the amount of calcium-containing dust particles colliding with water droplets in the atmosphere.
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Medical News
Major Hurdle Cleared to Diabetes Transplants
Washington University School of Medicine
June 13, 2013 — Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a way to trigger reproduction in the laboratory of clusters of human cells that make insulin, potentially removing a significant obstacle to transplanting the cells as a treatment for patients with type 1 diabetes.
Efforts to make this treatment possible have been limited by a dearth of insulin-producing beta cells that can be removed from donors after death, and by the stubborn refusal of human beta cells to proliferate in the laboratory after harvesting.
The new technique uses a cell conditioning solution originally developed to trigger reproduction of cells from the lining of the intestine.
"Until now, there didn't seem to be a way to reliably make the limited supply of human beta cells proliferate in the laboratory and remain functional," said Michael McDaniel, PhD, professor of pathology and immunology. "We have not only found a technique to make the cells willing to multiply, we've done it in a way that preserves their ability to make insulin."
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Odors from Human Skin Cells Can Be Used to Identify Melanoma
Monell Chemical Senses Center
June 13, 2013 — According to new research from the Monell Center and collaborating institutions, odors from human skin cells can be used to identify melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. In addition to detecting a unique odor signature associated with melanoma cells, the researchers also demonstrated that a nanotechnology-based sensor could reliably differentiate melanoma cells from normal skin cells. The findings suggest that non-invasive odor analysis may be a valuable technique in the detection and early diagnosis of human melanoma.
Melanoma is a tumor affecting melanocytes, skin cells that produce the dark pigment that gives skin its color. The disease is responsible for approximately 75 percent of skin cancer deaths, with chances of survival directly related to how early the cancer is detected. Current detection methods most commonly rely on visual inspection of the skin, which is highly dependent on individual self-examination and clinical skill.
The current study took advantage of the fact that human skin produces numerous airborne chemical molecules known as volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, many of which are odorous. "There is a potential wealth of information waiting to be extracted from examination of VOCs associated with various diseases, including cancers, genetic disorders, and viral or bacterial infections," notes George Preti, PhD, an organic chemist at Monell who is one of the paper's senior authors.
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Space News
Childhood Dream Job: NASA's Pit Crew
Becky Oskin, LiveScience Staff Writer
For Joshua Graham, growing up in a small Florida town meant frequent trips to Kennedy Space Center to watch space shuttle launches. When Graham was five years old, he recalls seeing an astronaut's spacesuit in the Space Center's museum and telling his mother, "I want to work on these."
Graham joined the Air Force at 17 to escape the town of St. Catherine, he told SPACE.com. That's when his first stroke of luck hit. Graham was assigned to work on flight suits for U-2 pilots at Beale Air Force Base in Northern California. Those flight suits are similar in construction to spacesuits, because the pilots skim the oxygen-poor stratosphere at an altitude of 70,000 feet (21 kilometers).
After four years in the service, Graham returned to Florida and worked in construction. All the while, he applied for every available industry and government job in his specialty.
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Exclusive: Antitrust probe of Lockheed-Boeing rocket venture
By Andrea Shalal-Esa
(Reuters) - U.S. regulators have opened a probe into whether a Lockheed-Boeing joint venture that launches U.S. government satellites into space has flouted antitrust laws.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating whether United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co, violated federal antitrust laws by "monopolizing" or restraining competition through an exclusivity agreement with the maker of the engines used in its rockets, according to a FTC document obtained by Reuters on Wednesday.
RD Amross, a joint venture of Russia's NPO Energomash and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, a unit of United Technologies Corp, provides RD-180 engines for ULA rockets.
Industry sources say ULA is preventing RD Amross from selling the engines to other rocket makers, including Orbital Sciences Corp, which is trying to break into the lucrative market for government rocket launches.
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Odd News
Chladni Figures: Amazing Resonance Experiment
By Brian Malow
When I first saw this video I thought it was fake. Perhaps an April Fool’s joke. But, not only is it real, it is a phenomenon that’s been known for hundreds of years. Why am I just hearing about it?
So, what are we seeing here?
This demonstration is by a prolific YouTube user who goes by the handle brusspup. I’ve been enjoying his amazing visual illusions for a few years – and I’m not the only one! His videos have wracked up tens of millions of views.
But this one isn’t an illusion. Rather, it’s a clever way to reveal patterns not normally visible to our senses. And it traces back to the 18th – and even the 17th – century and a somewhat obscure scientist.
Ernst Chladni was a German-born Hungarian physicist and musician who did pioneering work in acoustics and also in the study of meteorites.
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