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  1. #341
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    Re: Science News


    How to Move a Forest of Genes
    Sally Aitken of the University of British Columbia is using state-of-the art genomics and climate-mapping technologies to match trees to rapidly changing climates
    By Josh Fischman | August 1, 2015

    That trees need to match their habitats may sound obvious. But those habitats are changing as the planet warms—and trees can’t exactly get up and walk to a new home. If a species cannot keep pace with a changing climate, it is doomed. Because the trees themselves cannot relocate, scientists are exploring a novel solution: relocating the plants’ DNA.

    Sally N. Aitken, director of the ’s Center for Forest Conservation Genetics at the University of British Columbia, believes that ...

    Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...A_EVO_20150803



    Little Creatures of the Deep [Slide Show]
    A new robot successfully traps the larvae of exotic species living in the extremely deep ocean
    By Mark Fischetti | July 29, 2015


    The larvae of some nectochaetes have more elaborate setae. In this case, the larva was rolling up into a ball with setae pointing outward, perhaps for protection from perceived predators.
    Credit: Laurel Hiebert


    At more than 2,150 meters deep in the ocean, the water pressure is a crushing 220 kilograms per square centimeter. Oceanographers who have tried to snag samples of life in these pitch-black, frigid and high-pressure places have had to suck in water at high speed and try to filter out organisms, often damaging them in the process. But a team led by Duke University, the University of Oregon and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution last week snatched up the intact larvae of 16 different animals.

    The scientists used a new sampler, called SyPRID, which was carried to great depths by an autonomous underwater vehicle named Sentry. For more than eight hours engineers steered the robot in a precise and slow pattern. The maneuvering itself marked an achievement by barely disturbing the water in front of the craft—a common complication that pushes the tiny larvae out of a vehicle’s path before an instrument can pull them in. The long, cylindrical sampler processed large volumes of water every hour, yet did it slowly enough to not harm the fragile creatures, which are only a few hundred microns across. The final trick, according to an e-mail from Carl Kaiser, the vehicle program manager at Woods Hole, “is getting most of the larvae down to a relatively still area where they are further protected from the moving water.”

    Scientists are eager to have ...

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    Simple Cooking Method Flushes Arsenic out of Rice
    Preparing rice in a coffee machine can halve levels of the naturally occurring but toxic substance
    By Emily Sohn and Nature magazine | July 27, 2015



    Cooking rice by repeatedly flushing it through with fresh hot water can remove much of the grain’s stored arsenic, researchers have found—a tip that could lessen levels of the toxic substance in one of the world’s most popular foods.

    Billions of people eat rice daily, but it contributes more arsenic to the human diet than any other food. Conventionally grown in flooded paddies, rice takes up more arsenic (which occurs naturally in water and soil as part of an inorganic compound) than do other grains. High levels of arsenic in food have been linked to different types of cancer, and other health problems.

    Andrew Meharg, a plant and soil scientist at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, wondered whether cooking the grain ...

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    Young Scientist Makes Jet Engines Leaner and Cleaner with Plasma
    By Melissa C. Lott | July 31, 2015


    Photo Credit: FGC Plasma Solutions

    When Felipe Gomez was in high school, he became interested in how you could improve the safety and efficiency of jet engines. He began studying the phenomena of plasma-assisted fuel injection and exploring how the process worked in his garage. Gomez built his first prototype system using a Bunsen burner from school and propane from his family’s gas grill.

    Four years later, Gomez is double-majoring in mechanical and aerospace engineering and is the sole inventor behind two patented plug-and-play, plasma-assisted fuel injection systems. Though technically a junior at Case Western Reserve Univeristy, Gomez is already taking graduate classes and conducting research – all while clocking 20 hours in the pool each week as a NCAA swimmer.

    His company, FGC Plasma Solutions LLC, now owns both of Gomez’s patents and has gained national attention by winning ...

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    The 70th Anniversary of the Summer of The Bomb
    After seven decades should we be optimistic or pessimistic?
    By Michael Shermer | August 6, 2015



    July 16. August 6. August 9. September 2. The 70th anniversary of the summer of The Bomb is upon us, marking the dates of the first test detonation of “The Gadget” in the New Mexico desert, the dropping of the Little Boy bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima the explosion of the Fat Man bomb over Nagasaki, and the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.

    The results were unlike anything witnessed in human history. The Trinity plutonium bomb was detonated July 16 atop a 30-meter-high steel tower with an energy equivalence of about 20 kilotons (18,100 metric tons) of TNT that lofted a mushroom cloud 12 kilometers into the atmosphere (about the height that modern commercial jets fly), left a crater 76 meters wide filled with radioactive glass called trinitite (melted quartz grained sand), and could be heard as far away as El Paso, Texas. The Little Boy gun-type uranium 235 bomb detonated August 6 at an altitude of about 530 meters with an energy equivalence of around ...

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    Ban Killer Robots before They Become Weapons of Mass Destruction
    We need an international agreement to prevent the development of autonomous weapons before they threaten global security
    By Peter Asaro | August 7, 2015


    Vladislav Ociacia/Thinkstock

    SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology.

    Last week the Future of Life Institute released a letter signed by some 1,500 artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and technology researchers. Among them were celebrities of science and the technology industry—Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak—along with public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett. The letter called for an international ban on offensive autonomous weapons, which could target and fire weapons without meaningful human control.

    This week is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together killing over 200,000 people, mostly civilians. It took 10 years before the physicist Albert Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell, along with nine other prominent scientists and intellectuals, issued a letter calling for global action to address the threat to humanity posed by nuclear weapons. They were motivated by the atomic devastation in Japan but also by the escalating arms race of the Cold War that was rapidly and vastly increasing the number, destructive capability, and efficient delivery of nuclear arms, draining vast resources and putting humanity at risk of total destruction. They also note in their letter that those who knew the most about the effects of such weapons were the most concerned and pessimistic about their continued development and use.

    The Future of Life Institute letter is significant for the same reason: It is signed by a large group of those who know the most about ...

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    War in Space May Be Closer Than Ever
    China, Russia and the U.S. are developing and testing controversial new capabilities to wage war in space despite their denial of such work
    By Lee Billings | August 10, 2015


    Anti-satellite missile tests, like this one conducted by the U.S. Navy in February 2008, are part of a worrisome march toward military conflict in outer space.
    U.S. Navy


    The world’s most worrisome military flashpoint is arguably not in the Strait of Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, Iran, Israel, Kashmir or Ukraine. In fact, it cannot be located on any map of Earth, even though it is very easy to find. To see it, just look up into a clear sky, to the no-man’s-land of Earth orbit, where a conflict is unfolding that is an arms race in all but name.

    The emptiness of outer space might be the last place you’d expect militaries to vie over contested territory, except that outer space isn’t so empty anymore. About 1,300 active satellites wreathe the globe in a crowded nest of orbits, providing worldwide communications, GPS navigation, weather forecasting and planetary surveillance. For militaries that rely on some of those satellites for modern warfare, space has become the ultimate high ground, with the U.S. as the undisputed king of the hill. Now, as China and Russia aggressively seek to challenge U.S. superiority in space with ambitious military space programs of their own, the power struggle risks sparking a conflict that could cripple the entire planet’s space-based infrastructure. And though it might begin in space, such a conflict could easily ignite full-blown war on Earth.

    The long-simmering tensions are now approaching a boiling point due to ...

    Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._TECH_20150811



    Can Police Use Data Science to Prevent Deadly Encounters?
    As part of Obama's Police Data Initiative, researchers and police are studying "predictive analytics" to improve existing officer early warning systems
    By Larry Greenemeier | July 22, 2015


    Law enforcement and academia are working together to find ways of improving early warning systems meant to flag bad police behavior before it becomes a problem. (Image for illustration purposes only.)
    Courtesy of Thinkstock.


    Several high-profile cases of law enforcement officers using deadly force against civilians within the past year have politicians, police and researchers looking for ways to prevent such incidents. This search includes a closer look at the computerized early warning systems that many large police departments have used for years to identify officers who are most likely to overreact violently during stressful situations. The main challenge: it is difficult to say with certainty how well or even if these systems actually work.

    Early warning systems debuted in large police departments—those with more than 1,000 officers—decades ago as a way to identify those officers whose unprofessional behavior could cause problems in the communities they served. Departments programmed these systems to flag recurring complaints against officers and notify supervisors when certain thresholds were reached, such as a certain number of use-of-force complaints over a given period of time. Early systems’ predictive abilities were crude, primarily because they were capable of basing their analyses only on individual data sources—such as formal complaints—rather than combining information from various police databases that could provide context for an officer’s behavior. This might include the officer’s level of experience, whether the officer responded to an incident alone as well as the time and location of the event.

    Pres. Barack Obama’s recently announced Police Data Initiative seeks ...

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    Why People Oppose GMOs Even Though Science Says They Are Safe
    Intuition can encourage opinions that are contrary to the facts
    By Stefaan Blancke | August 18, 2015


    In the context of opposition to GMOs, genetic modification is deemed “unnatural” and biotechnologists are accused of “playing God”. The popular term “Frankenfood” captures what is at stake: by going against the will of nature in an act of hubris, we are bound to bring enormous disaster upon ourselves.
    Credit: ImageSource.com (MARS)


    Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have met with enormous public opposition over the past two decades. Many people believe that GMOs are bad for their health – even poisonous – and that they damage the environment. This is in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence that proves that GMOs are safe to eat, and that they bring environmental benefits by making agriculture more sustainable. Why is there such a discrepancy between what the science tells us about GMOs, and what people think? To be sure, some concerns, such as herbicide resistance in weeds and the involvement of multinationals, are not without basis, but they are not specific to GMOs. Hence, another question we need to answer is why these arguments become more salient in the context of GMOs.

    I recently published a paper, with a group of Belgian biotechnologists and philosophers from Ghent University, arguing that negative representations of GMOs are widespread and compelling because they are intuitively appealing. By tapping into intuitions and emotions that mostly work under the radar of conscious awareness, but are constituent of any normally functioning human mind, such representations become easy to think. They capture our attention, they are easily processed and remembered and thus stand a greater chance of being transmitted and becoming popular, even if they are untrue. Thus, many people oppose GMOs, in part, because it just makes sense that they would pose a threat.

    In the paper, we identify several intuitions that may affect people’s perception of GMOs. Psychological essentialism, for instance, makes us think of DNA as an ...

    Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._HLTH_20150818



    Lyme Disease May Linger for 1 in 5 Because of "Persisters"
    A new theory about long-lasting Lyme disease symptoms suggests treatment options
    By Melinda Wenner Moyer | Aug 18, 2015


    A colorized micrograph of a black-legged tick, which can carry up to five diseases.
    GETTY IMAGES


    Lyme disease is a truly intractable puzzle. Scientists used to consider the tick-borne infection easy to conquer: patients, diagnosed by their bull's-eye rash, could be cured with a weeks-long course of antibiotics. But in recent decades the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has realized that up to one in five Lyme patients exhibits persistent debilitating symptoms such as fatigue and pain, known as post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and no one understands why. The problem is growing. The incidence of Lyme in the U.S. has increased by about 70 percent over the past decade. Today experts estimate that at least 300,000 people in the U.S. are infected every year; in areas in the Northeast, more than half of adult black-legged ticks carry the Lyme bacterial spirochete, Borrelia burgdorferi. Although the issue is far from settled, new research lends support to the controversial notion that the disease lingers because these bacteria evade antibiotics—and that timing drug treatments differently could eliminate some persistent infections.

    These ideas stem from the observation of a few rogue bacterial cells. Kim Lewis, director of the antimicrobial discovery center at Northeastern University, and his colleagues grew B. burgdorferi in the laboratory, treated them with various antibiotics and found that whereas most of the bacteria died within the first day, a small percentage—called persister cells—managed to survive the drug onslaught. Scientists first discovered persister cells in 1944 in ...

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    Vaccine against Middle East Mystery Disease Shows Promise
    MERS inoculation triggers response in monkeys and camels, raising hopes for future human use
    By Dina Fine Maron | August 19, 2015


    Credit: NIAID/Flickr

    When the mystery virus was first detected in Saudi Arabia three years ago, researchers did not know quite what to make of it. The virus causing Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, it turns out, is a cousin of the bug behind severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and has been responsible for the deaths of more than 500 people, primarily in the Arabian Peninsula. Researchers on August 19, however, are reporting that a vaccine has begun to show promise against the disease—at least in monkeys, mice and camels. The vaccine, at both low or high doses, managed to protect monkeys from becoming ill with MERS.

    The international team of researchers plans to test whether the vaccine will also prove effective in humans. Even without that assurance, however, the researchers hope that if the experimental vaccine were deployed during an outbreak, it could tamp down disease in camels and potentially break the chain of transmission to humans. “I think this result is very exciting. I was very impressed they looked in diverse animals,” says Trish Perl, an infection control expert from Johns Hopkins University who has worked to help contain MERS in Saudi Arabia. Perl was not involved in this new research, published in Science Translational Medicine.

    The new vaccine, injected multiple times five weeks before exposure to the virus, protected eight rhesus macaques from developing the disease. Four nonimmunized monkeys, meanwhile ...

    Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_BS_20150821



    Do "Fat Letters" Help Kids Lose Weight?
    Schools are grading children’s body masses, but the data on such programs is scant
    By Dina Fine Maron | August 19, 2015


    Annual reports informally dubbed "fat letters" are designed to help nudge parents of overweight or obese children to make some healthy changes.
    Credit: Thinkstock/Wavebreakmedia Ltd


    Once a year many kids come home from school gripping a different kind of report card. The missives do not list “A’s,” “B’s” or something less. Instead, the reports, informally dubbed “fat letters,” rate how children’s body mass indexes (BMIs) compare with those of other kids their age.

    Many children are receiving poor marks. That’s not too surprising when you consider that more than one third of children and adolescents are overweight or obese. The fat letters are designed to help nudge parents of these children to make some healthy changes. There is some evidence that the letters may increase parents’ awareness of the importance of health and weight issues. Yet solid proof is lacking that the reports help obese children lose pounds.

    That absence of good data continues to irk critics who say ...

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    Back to the Future, Part II Predicted Techno-Marvels of October 21, 2015
    Mr. Fusion aside, this 1989 time-traveling comedy was spot-on about many devices that we now take for granted
    By Kat Long and Jess Schmerler | October 8, 2015

    “The encounter could create a time paradox, the results of which could…destroy the entire universe! Granted, that's a worst-case scenario.”—Doc Brown

    October 21, 2015, was a long way off when Back to the Future, Part II hit movie theaters in November, 1989. That October day was the destination for the film’s time-traveling teen Marty McFly, inventor Dr. (Doc) Emmett Brown, and their flux capacitor–equipped DeLorean car/time machine as they tried to fix a future mess caused by Marty’s nemesis, Biff. Leaping forward 26 years let the makers of the cinematic blockbuster show us a dazzling array of technology—flat TVs! flying vehicles! cold fusion! artificial intelligence!—all of which seemed quite radical in the 1980s. But here we are in 2015 (getting here the slow way, by aging) and it’s time for a reality check on the movie’s speculations. A surprising amount of Back to the Future tech really is a part of our everyday lives—although when it comes to flying cars and cold fusion, not so much.

    Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_BS_20151009
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    World's Grandest Canyon May Be Hidden Beneath Antarctica
    [SIZE=5][COLOR="#006400"]Newly discovered giant rifts and lakes mean that ice sheets could become surprisingly unstable as climate changes[/B]


    New discoveries point to giant lakes and canyons under Antarctic glaciers.
    Courtesy Stewart Jamieson


    Tucked beneath East Antarctica’s vast ice sheet is a frozen world, complete with subglacial lakes, rivers, basins, volcanoes and mountains. But roughly 91 percent of Antarctica—nearly twice the size of Australia—is unmapped, and the largest unsurveyed region on the icy continent is a region called Princess Elizabeth Land. Now a team of geologists has scoured that area to reveal a massive subglacial lake and a series of canyons, one of which—more than twice as long as the Grand Canyon—could rank as Earth’s largest. The findings indicate the ice sheets are less stable than previously thought, and could be strongly affected by climate change.

    Stewart Jamieson from Durham University in England and his colleagues made the discovery by looking for ...

    Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...A_SPC_20160128
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    Re: Science News

    http://www.nature.com/news/computer-...mentum-1.14666

    Many projects offer scoreboards and awards such as virtual titles or badges to mark progress; some people have become so devoted that they have had the badges tattooed on their bodies.
    Ok, which of you Badgers was involved in that article???

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    Pluto's Wonders Come into Focus
    NASA’s New Horizons mission has delivered a treasure trove of data from the dwarf planet


    A color image of Sputnik Planum, Pluto’s frozen “heart” of nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane ices.
    Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI


    Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_BS_20160325
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