Welcome to Science Saturday, where the Overnight News Digest crew informs and entertains you with this week's news about science, space, and the environment.
This week's featured story comes from Scientific American.
Government 'a Counting: Does the U.S. Census Need a 21st-Century Makeover?
By Katie Moisse
The Internet Age is upon us. But rather than circulating online, the 23rd Decennial Census stuck with the tried-and-true, and flooded the U.S. Postal Service March 16 through 18 with surveys en route to more than 120 million households nationwide. The 10-question form, which probes for demographic information such as age, sex and race, will help determine how more than $400 billion will be allocated to communities across the country. Citizens and noncitizens alike are required by law to complete the form and mail it back to the U.S. Census Bureau in the accompanying prepaid envelope. That's a lot of mail, but that's not all of it.
More science, space, and environment stories after the jump.
Recent Science Diaries and Stories
DarkSyde: This Week in Science
Meteor Blades: Open Thread for Night Owls: U.S. Green Lag
mole333: Going Beyond Earth Hour
Slideshows/Videos
WWF Canada on YouTube.
Earth Hour 2010 commercial presented by WWF-Canada
CBS on YouTube.
Spring marks the time of year when more couples than ever fall in love. Kelly Cobiella speaks with Dr. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist, about the causes behind this phenomenon.
Ron Magill from the Miami Zoo brings some of his cute, furry, and very wild animal friends to "The Saturday Early Show." Chris Wragge and Kelly Cobiella were smitten by these cuddly critters.
Ardalan Biology on YouTube.
Harvard University selected XVIVO to develop an animation that would take their cellular biology students on a journey through the microscopic world of a cell, illustrating mechanisms that allow a white blood cell to sense its surroundings and respond to an external stimulus. This award winning piece was the first topic in a series of animations XVIVO is creating for Harvards educational website BioVisions at Harvard.
Wired: Photos: SpaceShipTwo Completes First Captive Flight
By Jason Paur
Virgin Galactic has released some details about today’s first captive flight of SpaceShipTwo. The early morning flight lasted for nearly three hours and achieved an altitude of 45,000 feet. Attached to WhiteKnightTwo, the second generation spacecraft from Scaled Composites lifted off at 7:05am from the Mojave Air and Space Port.
Scaled Composites founder and legendary aerospace designer Burt Rutan said it was a momentous day for the Scaled and Virgin Galactic teams.
"The captive carry flight signifies the start of what we believe will be extremely exciting and successful spaceship flight test program."
Astronomy/Space
Time: China's Female Astronauts: Must Be a Married Mom
By Hillary Brenhouse
The men chosen to lead China into outer space are often referred to locally as "superhuman beings" — and not just because they train to cross the final frontier. Would-be taikonauts have to meet near impossible standards that are meant to weed out the less-than-flawless. Chinese astronauts cannot suffer from chronic sore throats or runny noses. They mustn't have food restrictions, strong regional accents, ringworm, cavities or scars. Bad breath, body odor and a snoring problem are all immediate disqualifiers. And if China's spacemen are expected to satisfy an unlikely string of qualifications, so too are its new spacewomen — with two notable additional criteria. China's first two female reserve astronauts, selected earlier this month from a pool of 15 female fighter pilots, were required to be wives and mothers.
The reasoning behind the prerequisite, according to officials, is that spaceflight could potentially harm the women's fertility. "It's out of the consideration of being responsible for the female pilots," Xu Xianrong, director of the PLA's Clinical Aerospace Medicine Center in Beijing and a member of the selection panel, told the official government news agency Xinhua. "Though there is little evidence on how the space experience will affect the female constitution, we have to be extra cautious, because this is a first for China." Ensuring that the female astronauts have already reproduced, he said, will guarantee that their family planning is not disrupted. But at least one authority, Zhang Jianqi, former deputy commander of the country's manned space program, has stated that the requirement stands because married women are more physically and psychologically mature.
Evolution/Paleontology
Physorg.com: Fossil feces point to a shark attack 15 million years ago
March 26, 2010 by Lin Edwards
(PhysOrg.com) -- Paleontologists Stephen Godfrey and Joshua Smith have been studying marine fossils in the Maryland area of Calvert Cliffs for many years, and Godfrey has catalogued over 26,000 items found on the local beaches. Many of these items are fossilized shark teeth belonging to several genera, but they have also found fossils of a wide range of other creatures, including fish, birds, sea cows, crocodiles, and seals.
Now, in a new paper, they report on coprolites (fossilized feces) found on the beach, that probably came from a crocodile, and which bear characteristic tooth marks of a prehistoric shark. The coprolites are examples of extremely rare trace fossils, which are fossils that provide evidence of animal behaviors that cannot be determined from body fossils.
Analysis of the two coprolites bearing teeth marks, and a third found nearby, suggested they came from a vertebrate predator that was not a shark, and while it is not certain, Professor Godfrey believes they were most likely produced by a crocodile. One of the coprolites had been severed by teeth, while the other bore a row of impressions of teeth. The fossils were dated to around 15 million years ago. Coprolites are fairly common at Calvert Cliffs, an area that was underwater at the time, but no coprolites had ever been found bearing teeth marks.
If there were any doubt that sharks will eat anything, this finding should dispel it.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman for this story.
Biodiversity
Live Science via MSNBC: Super bug! World’s strongest insect revealed
By Jeanna Bryner
After months of grueling tests, a species of horned dung beetle takes the title for world's strongest insect.
The beetle, called Onthophagus taurus, was found to be able to pull a whopping 1,141 times its own body weight, which is the equivalent of a 150-pound (70-kilogram) person lifting six full double-decker buses. While the study researcher knows of a mite that can take on a hair more, that organism is an arachnid, not an insect.
The finding, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, does more than elevate the beetle's status, as it lends insight to questions of evolutionary biology.
Discovery News via MSNBC: Birds fuel up on super foods before migrating
By Larry O'Hanlon
Bug-chomping songbirds have been discovered doing something remarkable before migrating south for the winter: They switch, awkwardly, to berries rich in antioxidants.
The dietary change has less to do with fattening up and more to do with stocking up on nutrients to help their bodies deal with the stresses of migration, say researchers.
"It has been known for some time, this phenomenon of birds switching to fruits in the fall," said bird researcher Scott McWilliams of the University of Rhode Island. It was assumed that the birds were packing in extra fats or carbs during cooler weeks when insects were on the wane. "But that didn't explain it enough."
Hat/Tip to Dump Terry McAuliffe for these stories.
National Geographic: First Amphibious Insects Found in Hawaii
Ker Than
Several new caterpillar species are equally at home on land or underwater, making them the first truly amphibious insects, scientists say.
The amphibious caterpillars—found only in Hawaii's fast-moving freshwater streams—belong to the moth genus Hyposmocoma, a group that includes more than 400 species.
The 14 newfound species are never seen far from water. But unlike purely aquatic caterpillars, these species can behave the same in water or on land for indefinite periods of time.
Time: Is Chinese Economic Demand Killing Africa's Gorillas?
By Nick Wadhams
Perhaps the worst misfortune to befall the world's gorillas is that they live in some of the most resource-rich and lawless parts of the planet. Their forest homes in Africa are rich in timber, gold, diamonds and coltan, the mineral used in electronics like cell phones, and the scramble to get at those minerals has been joined by ragtag militias, national armies, multinationals and governments alike.
That means it is an unusually bad time to be a gorilla. A new U.N. report warns that most of the remaining gorillas in Africa could go extinct within 10 to 15 years in the Greater Congo Basin, the swath of forest and savanna that stretches from Africa's Atlantic coast across the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to Rwanda and Uganda in the east.
The races for timber, gold and coltan are largely to blame for habitat loss, said the report. Militias sell their goods to middlemen and corporations that ignore the destruction caused by the resource trade, and they must be held accountable for the loss of biodiversity in the region. "Companies involved, also multinationals, have shown little or no concern regarding the origins of the resources obtained," says the report, co-authored by the U.N. Environment Program and Interpol. Militia groups that control mining in parts of Congo keep afloat with "an influx of arms in exchange for minerals and timber through neighboring countries, including the continued involvement of corrupt officials and subsidiaries of many multinational companies."
Biotechnology/Health
Time: Do Statins Work Equally for Men and Women?
By Catherine Elton
Lynne Newhouse Segal was the picture of robustness. At 59, the slim former lawyer was an avid runner, golfer and yoga practitioner. Segal, who lives in San Francisco, was healthy by nearly every measure — except her cholesterol level, which a routine test four years ago revealed was high. High cholesterol is a key risk factor for heart disease, especially in a patient Segal's age and with her family history (several close relatives had had heart attacks), so her doctor put her on a cholesterol-lowering statin drug as a preventive measure.
Segal was one of 24 million people taking drugs to lower cholesterol in the U.S. that year. The workhorse of American medicine, statins — first sold in the U.S. in 1987 and marketed under brand names like Lipitor, Zocor and Crestor — are designed to clear away LDL cholesterol, the waxy buildup that can clog arteries and trigger heart attacks and strokes. Doctors say the majority of current statin users are healthy people who don't have heart disease but who, like Segal, simply have high cholesterol. Use among this group, known as the primary prevention population, has made these drugs one of the world's best-selling classes.
But Segal's statin ended up preventing her from living a heart-healthy lifestyle. A month after she started taking the drug, she suffered muscle pain so severe, she had to stop all physical activity and was unable to sleep at night. Although her husband, who was worried about her risk of heart attack, pleaded with her to stay on the drug, she discontinued using it. The muscle pain receded. "My husband was scared for me. Doctors scare you. But I was in so much pain, I told him I would have rather died than stay on them," says Segal.
Science Daily: High-Fructose Corn Syrup Prompts Considerably More Weight Gain, Researchers Find
ScienceDaily (Mar. 22, 2010) — A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.
In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides. The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United States.
"Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn't true, at least under the conditions of our tests," said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. "When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese -- every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight."
Climate/Environment
Time: Meat-Eating Vs. Driving: Another Climate Change Error?
By Lisa Abend
Here we go again. On March 22, a scientist at the University of California at Davis pointed out a flaw in "Livestock's Long Shadow," a 2006 report by the United Nation Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) that attributes 18% of the world's carbon emissions to animal agriculture. It didn't take long for the bashing to begin again. "Eat Less Meat, Reduce Global Warming — or Not" ran a headline on the FoxNews website. "Meat Avoidance Cures Flat Feet and Other Lies," mocked another on a the Cattleman's Blog. London's Telegraph put it succinctly, "Now It's Cowgate."
It follows, of course, on what was called "Climategate" — which was precipitated by hackers who broke into the personal email account of a scientist at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit in November 2009 and revealed attempts to play down evidence that did not, on its surface, support global warming. Since then, a small number of errors have been discovered in climate research, including the Fourth Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the organization that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along with former U.S. vice-president Al Gore. Those errors have provided a steady trickle of fodder for climate change deniers and the mainstream media alike.
This latest tempest erupted when Frank Mitloehner, air quality expert in UC Davis' Animal Science department, gave a paper at a conference of the American Chemical Society. In that talk he noted that a much-cited comparison in the FAO report — that livestock produce more carbon emissions worldwide, at 18%, than transportation, at 15% — was based on a faulty comparison. To calculate the impact of animal agriculture, the FAO reports' authors relied on a method called life cycle assessment, which charts the emissions of every aspect of raising meat, beginning with the carbon costs of clearing land for planting the grain the animals eat, and following it all the way through until a package of beef is sitting in the supermarket. The figure for transportation-related emissions they used only counted those produced when vehicles burn fossil fuels, not the full production cycle of petroleum — drilling for oil, tankers on the ocean, filling up at gas stations, driving to the grocery. "They did life cycle assessment for one and not the other," Mitloehner says. "They basically compared apples and oranges."
Time: In West Virginia, a Battle Over Mountaintop Mining
By Sophia Yan
Pass through the handful of acres that make up Lindytown, W. Va., and you'll see empty houses, a boarded-up church, a town too minor to warrant its own post office. In this forgotten southern corner of the state, even the pine trees look sad.
But this desolate spot, like so many other abandoned small towns in Appalachia, is a gateway to hidden wealth. Deep within Boone County are rich seams of coal, holding some 3.6 billion tons of the black stuff and millions in profits — and much of it sits in Cherry Pond Mountain, a few miles from Lindytown. The largest coal-mining company in the region — Massey Energy, based in Richmond, Va. — has its eye on it.
Loud blasting began years ago. Massey and other large coal-producing companies like Patriot Coal, in St. Louis, employ a particularly destructive form of excavation called mountaintop mining, which exposes entire coal seams by blowing off a mountain's summit; used mostly in Appalachia, such mining produces 130 millions tons of coal in the region per year. It's less popular in other coal-rich spots such as Texas, where the coal is deeper underground and requires a different kind of mining to unearth. Coal companies say mountaintop mining is also cheaper than traditional mining: rather than burrowing under or digging through the "overburden" (the soil, trees and rock that lie on top of coal seams), which requires lots of manpower and expensive machinery, all you need to hit black gold in Appalachia are some explosives.
Science Daily: Eleven Questions for the Next Decade of Geographical Sciences
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2010) — Eleven questions that should shape the next decade of geographical sciences research were identified in a new report by the National Research Council. Reflecting a time when populations are moving and natural resources are being depleted, the questions aim to provide a more complete understanding of where and how landscapes are changing to help society manage and adapt to the transformation of Earth's surface.
The committee that wrote the report solicited input from the geographical science community to identify research priorities and the approaches, skills, data, and infrastructure necessary to advance research. The strategic directions span from overarching issues of environmental change and sustainability to specific areas in the field that are transforming. They are grouped by topic area, but are not ranked in any order of importance.
Science Daily: Summers Were Wetter in the Middle Ages Than They Are Today
(Mar. 25, 2010) — The severe epidemic of plague known as the "Black Death" caused the death of a third of the European population in the 14th century. It is probable that the climatic conditions of the time were a contributory factor towards the disaster. "The late Middle Ages were unique from the point of view of climate," explains Dr Ulf Büntgen of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) in Birmensdorf, Switzerland. "Significantly, there were distinct phases in which summers were wetter than they are today."
What exactly took place at the time can be reconstructed today by studying the annual growth rings of old oak trees. "Annual growth rings provide us with an accurate indication of summer droughts for each individual year, dating back to late medieval times," adds Professor Dr Jan Esper of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Together with colleagues at the universities of Bonn, Gießen, and Göttingen, Büntgen and Esser managed, with the aid of the information provided by tree growth rings, to identify for the first time the summer drought periods over extensive areas of Germany in the last 1000 years. Their results have been published in the leading specialist journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
Geology
Scientific American: Volcanoes killed with global warming, 200 million years ago
By David Biello
When Pangaea finally broke up, some 200 million years ago, the result was a lot of heat. Specifically, volcanism, as enormous flows of basalt burst to the surface, ultimately covering more than nine million square kilometers. It wasn't just the death of a supercontinent; it was also one of Earth's five major extinction events—and the one that paved the way for the dinosaurs.
Now scientists have linked this great volcanism to catastrophic climate change via an analysis of carbon isotopes in wood and soil preserved in rocks. In short, geologist Jessica Whiteside of Brown University and her colleagues show in a paper published March 22 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the extinction event at the end of the Triassic occurred at the same time as carbon dioxide levels jumped and shell-forming animals in the ocean suddenly had a much harder time forming their homes thanks to an eruption that lasted for more than 500,000 years.
Psychology/Behavior
Science Daily: How Music 'Moves' Us: Listeners' Brains Second-Guess the Composer
ScienceDaily (Jan. 16, 2010) — Have you ever accidentally pulled your headphone socket out while listening to music? What happens when the music stops? Psychologists believe that our brains continuously predict what is going to happen next in a piece of music. So, when the music stops, your brain may still have expectations about what should happen next.
A new paper published in NeuroImage predicts that these expectations should be different for people with different musical experience and sheds light on the brain mechanisms involved.
Research by Marcus Pearce Geraint Wiggins, Joydeep Bhattacharya and their colleagues at Goldsmiths, University of London has shown that expectations are likely to be based on learning through experience with music. Music has a grammar, which, like language, consists of rules that specify which notes can follow which other notes in a piece of music. According to Pearce: "the question is whether the rules are hard-wired into the auditory system or learned through experience of listening to music and recording, unconsciously, which notes tend to follow others."
Time: Study: Money Isn't Everything — But Status Is!
By Alice Park
The Beatles sang that money can't buy you love. But what about happiness? Research consistently shows that the more money people have, the more likely they are to report being satisfied with their lives.
And that makes sense: money buys you things that make life easier and more satisfying; the easier your life, the happier you tend to be. That relationship isn't entirely linear, since there's a limit to how much wealth can please you; the happiness benefit of an increasing income is especially powerful among people who don't have much money to start with, and diminishes as wealth increases. But studies also reveal that as average income levels have risen over time — in the U.S. and European nations, for example — residents of those countries have not reported being any happier than people were 30 or 40 years ago. It's a paradox that while income and happiness may be associated within a population at any given moment, overall economic growth does not appear to correspond to a boost in national satisfaction over time.
To understand why, researchers at the University of Warwick and Cardiff University decided to break down how individual people evaluate their income. What does wealth mean to people? Previous work has suggested that people tend to value their own wealth more — and are happier — when it compares favorably to everyone else's. The so-called reference-income hypothesis holds that it's not simply how much money you make that contributes to satisfaction, but how much more money you make than, say, the national average. The higher your salary than the norm, the happier you tend to be. That could explain in part why populations as a whole do not experience sunnier dispositions with economic growth, since a majority of individuals may not fall above the national income average.
Time: Does Puberty Make You Stupid? Lessons from Mice
Does Puberty Make You Stupid? Lessons from Mice
Up until 20 years ago, scientists believed that the human brain was largely mature by puberty. Apparently, they had failed to notice the irrational behavior and flaky thinking of teenagers. Now, of course, we know that the human brain continues to undergo serious restructuring well into the 20s.
Sophisticated brain-scan studies by Jay Giedd at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have shown dramatic changes throughout the teenage years as excess gray matter is pruned from the prefrontal cortex — the seat of higher-order thinking and making judgments (like not smoking weed right before your chemistry exam). Meanwhile, behavioral studies have shown what every parent already knows: teens have poor control over impulses and a tendency toward risk taking. Still, relatively little is known about how such changes affect learning or what happens at a biochemical level in the brain as teens go through their addled adolescence.
A fascinating study published in the current issue of Science helps fill in a bit of the picture, drawing evidence from that research-friendly fellow mammal, the mouse. The authors, a team from State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, wanted to look at whether the ability to learn is affected by changes in brain chemistry that occur at puberty. They devised a task that was relatively complex (at least for a mouse) and required learning how to avoid a moving platform that delivered a very mild shock.
Time: Telemental Health: Videoconferencing As Psychiatry Aid
By Julie Weingarden Dubin
Kanina Chavez lives an hour away from Children's Hospital in Seattle and used to have to take a whole day off from work whenever her daughter, Rachel, had an appointment with a psychiatrist. Rachel was a teenager when she started treatment for bipolar disorder roughly six years ago. Back then, she and her mother had never heard of telepsychiatry. But now they're using real-time videoconferencing in Olympia, Wash., to make it easier for Rachel to remain in the care of experts in Seattle. During the videoconferencing sessions, her psychiatrist can monitor how Rachel is doing, and Kanina can sit beside her daughter and take notes on the recommended adjustments to her daughter's medications. "I was a little apprehensive about my daughter not being face to face with the doctor," says Chavez. "But the conversation was just as good as if we were in person."
Telepsychiatry is a growing trend in mental health, says Dr. Kathleen Myers, who treats Rachel up close and personal despite the 75 miles between them. As director of the telemental health service at Children's Hospital, she points to one of the benefits of a videoconference: unlike a phone call, it allows doctors to observe a patient's facial expressions and body language. "You can talk back and forth in real time — it's off by a millisecond — so you get immediate reactions," says Myers, who, with a $3 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), is conducting the first large federally funded randomized clinical trial to determine the effectiveness of telemental health in treating mental-health problems in childhood.
The rise in telepsychiatry has come largely out of need. According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), between 7 million and 12 million youths suffer from mental, behavioral or developmental disorders. And a new nationally representative survey, funded in part by NIMH, indicates that 50% of the children in the U.S. who have certain mental disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder and depression are not being treated by a psychiatrist or other mental-health professional.
Time: Do Nannies Really Turn Boys into Future Adulterers?
By Belinda Luscombe
Mothers who outsource the care of their sons to other women may be inadvertently raising adulterers. Or so claims Dr. Dennis Friedman in a book that has kicked up a bit of a ruckus in Britain. A Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the doctor argues that men become womanizers because their mothers left them with nannies.
According to Friedman, having two women care for a baby boy may cause his little brain to internalize the idea that there are multiple females to meet his needs. "It introduces him to the concept of the other woman," he said in London's Daily Telegraph. He explicates the relationship in his book The Unsolicited Gift: Why We Do The Things We Do, which explores how a mother's love for her offspring can determine how those children behave as adults.
Girls are affected by nannies too. Not having her mother around creates in the infant female a "vacuum of need," says Friedman, which she might try to fill in later life with substance abuse or promiscuity — presumably with those married men in her social circle who were also raised by nannies.
I thought Freud was discredited.
Archeology/Anthropology
Science News: Ancient DNA suggests new hominid line
By Bruce Bower
Mitochondrial DNA analysis of a finger bone found in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia suggests that a group of unknown hominids ventured out of Africa less than a million years ago.J. Krause
A new member of the human evolutionary family has been proposed for the first time based on an ancient genetic sequence, not fossil bones. Even more surprising, this novel and still mysterious hominid, if confirmed, would have lived near Stone Age Neandertals and Homo sapiens.
Agence France Presse via Yahoo! News: 23,000 year old stone wall found at entrance to cave in Greece
ATHENS (AFP) – The oldest stone wall in Greece, which has stood at the entrance of a cave in Thessaly for the last 23,000 years, has been discovered by palaeontologists, the ministry of culture said Monday.
The age of the find, determined by an optical dating test, singles it out as "probably one of the oldest in the world", according to a ministry press release.
"The dating matches the coldest period of the most recent ice age, indicating that the cavern's paleolithic inhabitants built it to protect themselves from the cold", said the ministry.
Reuters: Stone Age could complicate N.Sea wind farm plans
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO, March 23 (Reuters) - Energy firms taking part in a North Sea boom for offshore wind farms will have to watch out for remains of Stone Age villages submerged for thousands of years, an expert said on Tuesday.
A region dubbed "Doggerland" connected Britain to mainland Europe across what is now the southern North Sea until about 8,000 years ago, when seas rose after the last Ice Age.
It is now the site of a planned vast expansion of offshore wind power by 2020 to help combat climate change.
Agence France Presse via the Daily Star (Lebanon): Lebanon's archaeological sites a pillager's paradise
Rana Moussaoui
BAALBEK: For three decades Abu Nayef has been digging for treasure from Lebanon’s rich archaeological past, but instead of museums his finds end up in the hands of unscrupulous traders around the globe.
In the eastern town of Baalbek, home to some of the world’s most beautiful Roman temples, scavengers like Abu Nayef have made careers of unearthing ancient treasure for sale to the highest bidder.
"I know that these are historical artifacts, but much of the time I don’t know their exact value," Abu Nayef admitted to AFP in his garden in Baalbek.
Tribune (Ireland): Lava bread, anyone? Pompeii snack bar rises from ashes after 2,000 years
Michael Day, Pompeii
THE LAST patrons who stood at the L-shaped counter of Pompeii's best-known snack bar eating the house-speciality – baked cheese smothered in honey – had to leave in a hurry owing to violent volcanic activity. But after an unforeseen break in business of 1,921 years, the former holiday hotspot of ancient Rome's in-crowd will finally re-open for business this weekend.
Visitors will be taken on a guided tour of the thermopolium (snack bar), once owned by Vetutius Placidus, and taste some of the food that was popular before the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 that buried the city under 60 feet of ash and pumice.
As with many high-profile launches, this weekend sees an advance opening ceremony for 300 special guests, chosen at random. The full opening will take place later.
BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/...
There is thought to have been a hill fort on this site dating from the late or post-Roman period, but the location's importance goes back to the Bronze Age.
Today, the medieval castle ruins are a focal point of a hilly walk from the community of Caergwrle, off the A541 Wrexham-Mold road, and it's managed by Caergwrle Community Council.
From the ruins there are far-reaching views over Cheshire and, therefore, England, as it was a border fortification built by Welsh noble Dafydd ap Gruffydd in the 1200s.
WPTZ: Champlain Bridge Demolition Leads To Unique Discovery
By David Schneider
Weekend Anchor
dschneider@hearst.com
On the shores of Lake Champlain, the demolition of a historic span that traversed the lake for decades has led to discovery of another historic site with close ties to the lake.
"What we found was significant," said the director of UVM's Consulting Archaeology Program, John Crock, Ph.D. "It's clearly an early foundation and it may be related to one of the earliest settlements in the area."
UVM archeologists recently discovered a French fort while digging around the bridge site prior to its demolition and they believe -- based on old French surveys and artifacts from the dig site -- they have identified exactly which fort they found.
Copenhagen Post (Denmark): Book says Queen was a pipe pilferer
Allegations that the young Queen Margrethe dug up a number of clay smoking pipes in London’s Hyde Park and brought them back to Denmark without permission
Queen Margrethe, in her younger days, used to dig up old clay pipes in London’s Hyde Park without the permission of the authorities, it has been alleged. The pipes, which she unearthed in rose gardens within the royal park, were brought back to Denmark.
The revelation has come to light in a new book ‘Queen Margrethe and archaeology’ in which Count Jorgen Ahlefeldt-Laurvig recalls a time he spend with the young queen in the 1960s. The count tells of how he and the Queen scaled a fence to get at the rose beds where the clay pipes, thought to be from the 1500s, were buried. It is unclear whether they are now in the National Museum in Copenhagen.
Anniston Star: Oxford project shut down: Oversight in reporting human remains costs city thousands, delays work
by Patrick McCreless
Staff Writer
Construction on a multi-million-dollar Oxford sports complex halted a month ago because the discovery of ancient human remains at the site was not reported to the proper authorities — an oversight that so far has forced the city to pay approximately $200,000 to its idle project contractor.
The Oxford City Council briefly discussed the situation during the work session before its regular meeting Tuesday. The council agreed to sit down with all parties involved at 10 a.m. April 5 at City Hall to learn how the oversight occurred and to get the project started again. The parties involved include a representative from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which shut down the project; Taylor Corp., the contractor; University of Alabama archaeologist Robert Clouse, who is overseeing the project; and engineering firm Goodwyn, Mills and Cawood.
"There's obviously been an oversight and someone's responsible for that oversight," Councilman Mitch Key said Tuesday.
Infozine: Kansas City Will Receive a Federal Grant for Historic Preservation Project
Staff infoZine
The city will use the grant to partner with the Missouri Archaeological Society to plan and implement a pilot program to train avocational archaeologists.
Jefferson City, MO - infoZine - Gov. Jay Nixon announced that the city of Kansas City, Mo., a Certified Local Government, will receive a $23,840 grant through the federal Historic Preservation Fund. The city will use the grant to partner with the Missouri Archaeological Society to plan and implement a pilot program to train avocational archaeologists and other members of the public in the basic ethics, methods and techniques of modern anthropological archaeology and to encourage statewide site recordation.
Yes, recordation is a word in the dictionary. I looked it up.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above articles.
Mindless Eating: The Largest Last Supper
ITHACA, NY: Were the twelve apostles guilty of overeating at the Last Supper? Two brothers—an eating behavior expert and a religious studies scholar—are publishing findings that might make you think twice at your Easter dinner.
Brian and Craig Wansink teamed up to analyze the amount of food depicted in 52 of the best-known paintings of the Last Supper (Phaidon Press 2000). After indexing the sizes of the foods by the sizes of the average disciple’s head, they found that portion size, plate size, and bread size increased dramatically over the last one thousand years. Overall, the main courses depicted in the paintings grew by 69%, plate size by 66%, and bread size by 23%.
The study’s findings are published in the April 2010 issue of the International Journal of Obesity.
Physics
Scientific American: Light Improvement: Could Quantum Dots Boost the Quality of Cell Phone Pix?
By Larry Greenemeier
Semiconductor crystals known as quantum dots have long held the promise of improving solar cells, lasers and lighting fixtures, but the reality is that integrating these fluorescent nanoparticles into existing technologies has proved difficult. One Silicon Valley start-up now aims to change this by the end of next year using quantum dots to vastly improve the picture-taking quality of cell phone cameras.
The secret, according to Menlo Park, Calif.–based InVisage Technologies, Inc., is a new material called QuantumFilm, which the company introduced Monday at the DEMO Spring 2010 conference in Palm Desert, Calif. QuantumFilm is an extremely light absorbent coating, according to InVisage, that will enable pixel sensors to capture about 95 percent of an image, nearly a fourfold increase over current image sensors. QuantumFilm exists today as a working prototype, with InVisage planning to have production-quality samples ready by year's end.
Chemistry
Science Daily: New Method Could Revolutionize Dating of Ancient Treasures
ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2010) — Scientists have developed a new method to determine the age of ancient mummies, old artwork, and other relics without causing damage to these treasures of global cultural heritage. Reporting at the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), they said it could allow scientific analysis of hundreds of artifacts that until now were off limits because museums and private collectors did not want the objects damaged.
"This technique stands to revolutionize radiocarbon dating," said Marvin Rowe, Ph.D., who led the research team. "It expands the possibility for analyzing extensive museum collections that have previously been off limits because of their rarity or intrinsic value and the destructive nature of the current method of radiocarbon dating. In theory, it could even be used to date the Shroud of Turin."
Rowe explained that the new method is a form of radiocarbon dating, the archaeologist's standard tool to estimate the age of an object by measuring its content of naturally-occurring radioactive carbon. A professor emeritus at Texas A&M University College Station, Rowe teaches at a branch of the university in Qatar. Traditional carbon dating involves removing and burning small samples of the object. Although it sometimes requires taking minute samples of an object, even that damage may be unacceptable for some artifacts. The new method does not involve removing a sample of the object.
Energy
Scientific American: Metro Motivation: GM Envisions Networked Mini Cars for City Streets
By Larry Greenemeier
As drivers await the arrival of General Motors's much-anticipated Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid car later this year, GM unveiled an electric vehicle of an entirely different stripe on Wednesday at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. The company's Electric Networked Vehicle (EN-V) is a mini electric vehicle built for two, unless you are using it to go shopping, in which case you might have room for yourself and a bag of groceries.
Working with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. Group (SAIC), GM designed the EN-V to meet the challenges of getting around major metropolises as urban populations swell. The EN-V resembles more an enclosed pedicab—minus the bike—than it does a car. In fact, the 1.5-meter-long vehicle is three times shorter than a typical car and weighs less than 500 kilograms, one third as much as most cars on the road today.
The EN-V relies on dynamic stabilization technology similar to that of the one-person Segway scooter to keep its balance, and can be operated autonomously or under manual control. In autonomous mode the EN-V is designed to use high-speed wireless connectivity and GPS navigation to automatically select the fastest route, based on real-time traffic conditions gleaned from the Web or some other networked source of traffic information.
Scientific American: Turning Bumpy Roads into an Electrifying Product
By Saqib Rahim and Climatewire
One carefree summer day in California, a few college students went for a joy ride. It was the perfect day to don the shades, roll down the windows, and crank up the tunes.
But then someone noticed all the bumps in the road. These were engineering students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the group got to thinking: Isn't there energy in that?
So they rigged up a bunch of small sensors. They strapped them onto rental cars and took them for a spin. Sure enough, they found that just by bouncing over potholes and bumps, the cars were losing considerable energy through their shock absorbers. To minimize the bouncing, they compress air or liquids, which generates heat.
Scientific American: Can a Chemist Deliver Distributed Energy from a Water Bottle?
By Saqib Rahim and Climatewire
Dan Nocera is a salesman who doesn't need the sale. For his entire career, he's pursued a simple question: Just how do plants take sunlight, combine it with water and get energy out of it?
After 25 years of study, he's begun to mimic the process in a small, cheap gadget. It runs on just a bottle of water a day.
He regularly stumps for the technology at energy conferences, where audiences bubble with curiosity at its many merits. His startup company, Sun Catalytix, is already building prototypes. Last year, it received a $4 million award from the Energy Department's Advanced Projects Research Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program -- proof that someone thinks it could be a breakthrough technology in waiting.
Science, Space, Environment, and Energy Policy
Reuters via Scientific American: Philadelphia Seeks Ban on Natural Gas-Drilling Method
By Jon Hurdle
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Philadelphia officials asked a state regulator on Thursday to ban the natural-gas drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing until its environmental effects, especially on drinking water, are studied.
The City Council urged the Delaware River Basin Commission to deny a drilling permit to Stone Energy Corp, a Louisiana-based oil and gas company, or to any other company that wants to use the technique to extract gas in the watershed that supplies the city's drinking water.
Stone Energy began operations in a protected area of the river basin without the necessary approvals, and now has applied for permits to drill for gas, extracting water it needs from a tributary of the river, the council said.
Scientific American: The U.K. finally gets its own space agency
By John Matson
The United Kingdom has firmed up its position within the ranks of the space-faring, announcing on March 23 the creation of a new space center and an impending consolidated national space agency. The U.K. Space Agency (UKSA), which officially launches April 1, will take over from the British National Space Center, a hodgepodge organization operated by 10 governmental agencies. Preliminary plans for a national space agency had been announced in December.
Scientific American: Shark fin soup: CITES fails to protect 5 species of sharks from overfishing and finning
By John Platt
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) this week decided not to create any new international trade restrictions to protect five endangered shark species, all of which are highly prized for their use in the Chinese delicacy known as shark fin soup, or, as I call it, "extinction in a bowl."
Shark fin soup is particularly unappetizing dish to conservationists, as shark "finning" remains one of the most controversial hunting or fishing activities in the world. Sharks are caught, their fins are chopped off, and the bodies (which are not prized) are dumped back into the ocean—often alive, where they suffer a horrible death.
Science Education
N.Y. Times: Bias Called Persistent Hurdle for Women in Sciences
By TAMAR LEWIN
A report on the underrepresentation of women in science and math by the American Association of University Women, to be released Monday, found that although women have made gains, stereotypes and cultural biases still impede their success.
The report, "Why So Few?," supported by the National Science Foundation, examined decades of research to cull recommendations for drawing more women into science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called STEM fields.
"We scanned the literature for research with immediate applicability," said Catherine Hill, the university women’s research director and lead author of the report. "We found a lot of small things can make a difference, like a course in spatial skills for women going into engineering, or teaching children that math ability is not fixed, but grows with effort."
Science Writing and Reporting
Eruptions on ScienceBlogs: Q&A: MSNBC's Alan Boyle answers your questions about science in the mainstream media
Alan Boyle, Science Editor for MSNBC.com, was kind enough to answer questions about science in the mainstream media after the fallout of the coverage of the Chilean earthquake.
Alan has been with MSNBC.com since 1996, covering science and technology. He has his own blog on space called the Cosmic Log. He's also won quite the array of awards including from the National Academies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Association of Science Writers, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Space Frontier Foundation, the Pirelli Relativity Challenge and the CMU Cybersecurity Journalism Awards program. He's also a big fan of Pluto.
I want to thank Alan for taking the time to answer the questions!
Science is Cool
L.A. Times: Digging up a piece of Hollywood history
By Mike Anton
Reporting from Guadalupe, Calif. - Strong winds scour the dunes, which hide a curious history. Nails and fragments of concrete are scattered everywhere. Steel cables, carved pieces of wood and slabs of painted plaster poke out of the ground, ghosts rising from the grave.
In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille came to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes on California's Central Coast and built a movie set that still captures the imagination -- a colossal Egyptian dreamscape for the silent movie version of "The Ten Commandments."
Under the direction of French artist Paul Iribe, a founder of the Art Deco movement, 1,600 craftsmen built a temple 800 feet wide and 120 feet tall flanked by four 40-ton statues of the Pharaoh Ramses II. Twenty-one giant plaster sphinxes lined a path to the temple's gates. A tent city sprung up to house some of the 2,500 actors and 3,000 animals used to tell the story of Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman for this story.
New York Magazine: What If Women Ran Wall Street?
By Sheelah Kolhatkar
Despite what we’ve been led to believe, the market isn’t rational or efficient at all—it’s all about feelings. The major plot points of the crisis largely turned on emotion: Dick Fuld was too egotistical to sell Lehman Brothers when he had the chance, so his pride drove it into the ground; Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers lost huge sums of money on subprime mortgages despite the fact that they suspected the worst ("I’m fearful of these markets," Ralph Cioffi e-mailed a colleague back in 2007); Merrill Lynch was the "fat kid," as the investor Steve Eisman has put it, so desperate to be like Goldman Sachs that it barreled into every dumb investment imaginable and had to be bailed out by Bank of America. Almost every single bank chief doubled down on mortgage junk at exactly the wrong moment. Emotions led otherwise intelligent men—because, let’s face it, all of them were men—to make terrible decisions.
According to a new breed of researchers from the field of behavioral finance, Wall Street’s volatility is really driven by our body chemistry. It’s the chemicals pulsing through traders’ veins that propel them to place insane bets and enable bank executives to make risky decisions—and those same chemicals tend to have the same effect on everyone, turning them into a herd of overheated animals. And because the vast majority of these traders and finance executives are men, the most important chemical in question is testosterone.
Here are a few things we know about testosterone: Both men and women produce it, but men make fifteen times as much of it as women, on average. It causes all sorts of physical differences—in body hair, muscle mass, jawlines, and so on. Behaviorally, it does all the things that one would expect: It is linked to increased aggression and dominance, confidence, hostility, violence, sensation-seeking, and the searching out of mates ("I felt like I had to have sex once a day or I would die," Drew—formerly Susan—Seidman told The Village Voice, after having testosterone injections as part of his transformation from a woman to a man). One of the most fascinating things about testosterone is the way it can be influenced by the environment. A man who stays home with his kids, for example, is likely to see his testosterone level drop over time. Testosterone varies throughout the day, peaking in the morning and gradually ebbing through the afternoon. Perhaps not surprisingly, single men have higher levels than married men. If you eat more meat, it tends to be higher. As it does when a man is in the presence of an attractive woman, or looking at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Or in a highly competitive environment with other guys, like a rugby game—or the Bear Stearns trading floor.
Time: Lunch Is a Battlefield
By James Poniewozik
If people are what they eat, then nations are what is eaten in them. For countries, food is a statement of culture and identity. It's why the French invented terroir — food and drink as an expression of the land — and why American lawmakers, ticked off at the French during the Iraq invasion, invented "freedom fries."
Judged by its food, then, what is the U.S.? To look at our food TV — a mixed-message buffet of indulgence and shame — it's a binge-and-purger. One batch of shows is saturated with fat: Paula Deen cooking "fried butter balls," Adam Richman downing sandwiches the size of dachshunds on Man v. Food, Guy Fieri deep-frying s'mores. (Grilled s'mores? That's rabbit food!) Another is obsessed with weight loss: The Biggest Loser, Dance Your Ass Off, Kirstie Alley's Big Life. Eat this! You're fat! Eat this! You're fat!
Yeah, it's dysfunctional. But dammit, it's our dysfunction. So when ABC brought in British chef Jamie Oliver to teach "the unhealthiest city in America" how to eat right, it was more than a reality-show premise. It was a guaranteed culture clash and a political metaphor on a platter.