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8,465 articles from FEBRUARY 2012
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WEDNESDAY 29. FEBRUARY, 2012
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23:35
At least nine killed as tornadoes strike U.S. Midwest (Reuters)
Reuters - Powerful storms that spawned tornadoes ripped through the U.S. Midwest on Wednesday, killing nine people, including six in Illinois who were crushed when a house was lifted up and fell on them, authorities said. -
23:31LiveScience.com - The debate continues over how many species of horned dinosaurs existed. A new paper concludes that Triceratops and Torosaurus were different species and not, as previously argued, two different age ranges of the same species.
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23:25
Women Can Make New Eggs After All, Stem-Cell Study Hints
Women may make new eggs throughout their reproductive years, suggests a new stem-cell study that challenges a long-held biological tenet.
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23:24
Cholera's nano-dagger: Researchers observe how pathogen decimates competing bacteria and human cells
Bacteria live in a state of perpetual warfare, with different species battling for dominion over their competitors and when pathogen, over their infected host. New research suggests that the human pathogen Vibrio cholerae, which causes the disease cholera, kills off its microbial rivals by jabbing them with a spring-loaded poison dagger. Were it not for that defense, called the Type 6 secretion system (T6SS), V. cholerae might not out-compete its neighbors to sicken millions of people every year. -
23:24A nationwide survey shows a positive correlation between Green School practices and student achievement in science. The study was conducted by the University of Colorado Denver's Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences. And presented Wednesday at the Green Schools National Network conference in Denver.
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23:24Visible and Infrared satellite imagery together provide a clearer picture of what a tropical cyclone is doing. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over newly strengthened Cyclone Irene and captured both types of images, which showed the extent and power of the storm.
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23:24The pecan weevil, Curculio caryae (Horn), is a major pest of pecans throughout the southeastern United States, as well as portions of Texas and Oklahoma.
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23:24A new NASA study revealed that the oldest and thickest Arctic sea ice is disappearing at a faster rate than the younger and thinner ice at the edges of the Arctic Ocean's floating ice cap.
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23:24Certain kinds of male birds gather into small clusters of land called leks to perform their courtship dances, and according to science, who they choose to associate with matters. A new study by University of Miami Evolutionary Biologist J. Albert Uy and his collaborators finds that some male birds are better at attracting females if they gather with close male kin, than in the company of distant relatives. The findings provide an intriguing account of why individuals help each other, especially when cooperating can be costly.
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23:18
Another Loan Guarantee Recipient Lays Off Workers
In a tough market for solar panels, Abound Solar is halting production.
Abound Solar, which makes cadmium telluride thin-film solar panels, and had been awarded a $400 million conditional loan guarantee by the U.S. Department of Energy, announced yesterday that it is stopping production at its 65-megawatt factory in Colorado and laying off 180 workers.
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23:14
Parkinson’s Disease Drug May Help Brain Injuries, Report Says
The study showed that patients made progress when taking the medicine. If replicated, the improvements could offer doctors a standard treatment, experts say.
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23:00
ScienceShot: What the Snow Leopard Ate
DNA analysis of fecal material reveals some surprises -
22:57Hoping to clear up confusion about the growing welter of genetic tests, the National...
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22:51
Senate examines foreign funding of charities
The Conservative government has quietly begun looking into the charitable status of environmental groups in the Senate.
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22:49
Scientists Reconstruct Long-Extinct Giant Penguin
It was a slender bird, with long wings and a spear-like bill to catch swift ocean prey. And scientists say the first glimpse of the extinct giant penguin species was worth the 26 million-year wait.Experts from New Zealand and the United States reconstructed a fossil skeleton of one of the giant sea birds to reveal a body shape unique from known penguin species with features that have them describing it as one elegant bird.
The bird they dubbed Kairuku -- Maori for "diver who returns with food" -- stood about 4 feet 2 inches (1.3 meters) tall and lived in the Oligocene period, about 26 million years ago. The research on Kairuku was published this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The first Kairuku bones were discovered 35 years ago in New Zealand by Ewan Fordyce, a professor of geology at New Zealand's University of Otago. He recently teamed with Dan Ksepka, a research assistant professor at North Carolina State University, to reconstruct a skeleton from multiple sets of fossils, using a king penguin as a model.
"It's pretty exciting," Fordyce told The Associated Press. "We've got enough from three key specimens to get a pretty reliable construction of its body size."
Fordyce said the bird's elongated bill may have been useful in catching swift prey and its large body size likely helped it swim farther and dive deeper than modern-day penguins.
The bird is about a foot (30 centimeters) taller than the largest modern penguin, the emperor. It would have weighed about 132 pounds (60 kilograms), 50 percent more than an emperor.
When Kairuku was alive, most of modern New Zealand was submerged beneath the ocean. The scientists believe the remaining isolated, rocky land masses helped keep the penguins safe from potential predators and provided them with plentiful supplies of food.
Fordyce said there are...
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22:49Federal health officials are adding new safety warnings about risks of memory loss and elevated blood sugar to statins, the most widely prescribed group of cholesterol-lowering medications.
The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday it is making labeling changes to medicines like Pfizer Inc.'s Lipitor, AstraZeneca's Crestor and Merck & Co. Inc.'s Zocor. The drugs are used by tens of millions of U.S. patients to help prevent heart-related problems associated with cholesterol.
New labeling on all such drugs will warn of memory loss and confusion reported among certain patients taking statins. In general the problems were not serious and went away after patients stopped taking the drugs, according to the FDA.
The updated labels will also mention elevated levels of blood sugar, associated with diabetes, that have been reported in some patients taking statins. A growing number of studies published over the last five years have found a link between statin use and type 2 diabetes. Last June, a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association analyzed five older randomized trials and concluded the increased risk was small but real for people taking higher doses of any statin.
Cardiologists said Tuesday that the lifesaving benefits of statin drugs still drastically outweigh the risks.
"Patients should not see this as a new danger with the drugs, but as a known abnormality that appears in blood testing and should be discussed with their doctor," said Dr. Kevin Marzo, chief of cardiology at Winthrop-University Hospital in New York.
Marzo said the labeling change may lead doctors to monitor patients more closely for diabetes, especially those on high-dose statins, but he does not expect significant changes in how the drugs are prescribed. He urged patients to continue taking their medication as directed.
Statins are mainly prescribed to prevent heart attacks in people with clogged arteries and work by dramatically...
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22:49An eroding Texas island where more than 20,000 birds nest in scraggly trees and on a narrow patch of sand will be built back up thanks to a partnership between the Nature Conservancy of Texas and Shell Oil that was announced Tuesday.
Oil companies and other heavy industries often blamed for environmental damage have a long history of funding restoration work. But partnerships like this one between the Nature Conservancy and Shell have become more common as state and federal funding dries up following the worst recession since World War II.
The Nature Conservancy tried for months to get money to restore Shamrock Island, preserving it as habitat for more than a dozen species of birds, some of them threatened or just off the endangered list, but federal and state grants for the $2.3 million project were denied. Private donations had shrunk. Only Shell's $500,000 donation will allow the first phase of the work to begin.
"The federal government has reduced spending in most areas that have to do with conservation," said Laura Huffman, director of the Nature Conservancy in Texas, who was active in trying to get federal grants for the Shamrock Island project. "You don't get awards every time you apply ... but now there are even fewer dollars out there."
One issue is that federal budget cuts have made less money available to agencies that usually make some of the biggest conservation grants. For example, the North American Wetlands Conservation Fund saw its budget drop from about $48 million in fiscal year 2010 to about $36 million in 2012. The Coastal and Estuarine Land Conservation Program, a part of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, lost three-fourths of its budget, which was $20 million in 2010 but just $5 million this year. And the Fish and Wildlife Service State and...
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22:47Iran opened a key space facility to visiting journalists for the first time Wednesday in an apparent effort to show its willingness to allow glimpses at sensitive technology even as Tehran and U.N. inspectors trade accusations about access to nuclear sites and experts.
The press tour of the Alborz Space Center, about 40 miles (70 kilometers) west of Tehran, also sought to showcase Iran's advances in aerospace sciences less than a month after it announced another satellite was launched into orbit.
Iran's ambitious space program has raised concerns in the West because of possible military applications. The same rocket technology used to send satellites into orbit -- including the Feb. 3 launch of the domestically made Navid, or Gospel -- can also be retooled to create intercontinental warheads.
Iran says Navid was designed to collect data on weather conditions and monitor natural disasters.
The space center visit -- by nearly 50 journalists for international media in two separate groups -- comes as Iran and the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency are locked in disputes over access to officials and key sites in the Islamic Republic's atomic program.
The West and allies fear Iran's uranium enrichment labs could eventually produce weapons-grade material. Iran says it only seek nuclear power for energy and medical research.
Allowing journalists into the space facility could be an attempt to discredit U.N. claims that Iran is keeping a tight lid on its technological capabilities. Officials said the space center has no military role, and is used to control and collect data from various satellites, including Navid.
The facility is on a sprawling tract at the base of hills. Inside are huge satellite dishes, buildings housing the control rooms monitoring satellites, including display panels nearly three feet (a meter) across.
"We are the control station for Navid satellite, which has been designed to take pictures from...
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22:46You may think you're pretty familiar with your hands. You may think you know them like the back of your hand. But as the following exercises derived from the latest hand research will reveal, your pair of bioengineering sensations still hold quite a few surprises up their sleeve.
Make a fist with your non-dominant hand, knuckle side up, and then try to extend each finger individually while keeping the other digits balled up tight. For which finger is it extremely difficult, maybe even impossible, to comply?
Now hold your hand palm up, fingers splayed straight out, and try curling your pinky inward without bending any other finger. Can you do it?
Imagine you're an expert pianist or typist, working on your chosen keyboard. For every note or letter you strike, how many of your fingers will move?
You're at your desk and you start reaching over for your water bottle. What does your hand start doing long before it makes contact with the desired object?
On, then, to the answer key. The rare rubber joints notwithstanding, most people who attempt that first sequential digit- straightening exercise find that the thumb, index and middle fingers all spring free of the fist with relative ease and the pinky is not far behind, but that the ring finger is a stuck, stubborn mule: no matter how they struggle, it doesn't want to move.
By a similar token in challenge No. 2, the majority discover to their frustration that they just can't curl their pinky palmward without the joints of their ring finger flexing along for the ride.
Our fingers can seem like restless Ariels, so fast and dexterous you'd think they had plans and options of their own. Yet as scientists who study the performance, circuitry and evolution of the human hand have lately determined, the appearance of digital independence...
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22:41LiveScience.com - A new Planned Parenthood initiative combines sex and social media to encourage people to use protection while they're getting busy.
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22:40
If Android users click the wrong link, an attacker could intercept phone calls and track their location.
A chilling demonstration to a small, packed room at the RSA security conference today showed how clicking a single bad Web link while using a phone running Google's Android operating system could give an attacker full remote control of your phone. Once George Kurtz and colleagues from security startup
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22:34
Google is again offering cash prizes for hackers who can find security holes in its Chrome browser during an annual conference in Vancouver this March.
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22:01Distributors of the new $35 Raspberry Pi PC were swamped with preorders from customers in Europe, the U.S. and Asia on Wednesday -- the diminutive computing device's first day of availability.
Created by a non-profit charity based in the United Kingdom, the credit-card-size PC is designed to run the ArchLinux, Debian and Fedora distributions of ARM GNU/Linux, which users can purchase on preloaded SD cards sold separately.
"This really came from an observation that people were coming to [university courses] perhaps with less skills than they used to have," said Raspberry Pi Foundation co-founder Robert Mullins. "The primary goal was to build a low-cost computer that every child could own, where programming it was the natural thing to do with it, and also something that could be built into larger projects."
Due to huge interest in the charity's new $35 PC, the Web sites of global distributor RS Components and the element14 community of Premier Farnell were overwhelmed with preorders on Wednesday -- even though preorders were limited to one per customer.
"With tens of thousands of customers looking to order on the RS Web site since the launch of Raspberry Pi earlier today, this is the greatest level of demand RS has ever received for a product at one time," said Chris Page, the general manager of electronics at RS Components.
A Great Opportunity RS expects to receive the first batch of boards into warehouses at the end of next week, with the shipping of products on a first-come, first-served preorder basis.
"We clearly understand how excited customers are about this ground-breaking product and we are working closely with Raspberry Pi to satisfy this unprecedented demand," Page said.
Premier Farnell sees the Raspberry Pi as a great opportunity to engage a new generation of engineers and computer experts. "Through our element14 Community we...
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22:01SPACE.com - Scientists need your help in the search for life beyond Earth.
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21:55
New infant formula ingredients boost babies' immunity by feeding their gut bacteria
Adding prebiotic ingredients to infant formula helps colonize the newborn's gut with a stable population of beneficial bacteria, and probiotics enhance immunity in formula-fed infants, two studies report.
Naposledy aktualizované zdroje
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Guardian Unlimited Science (dnes, 01:07)
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Discovery (dnes, 00:58)
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BBC Science/Nature (26. 5, 18:46)
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EurekAlert (26. 5, 06:00)
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TIME (25. 5, 19:50)
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NASA (24. 5, 21:35)
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