from the New York Times (Registration Required)
CORVALLIS, Ore.—As a young geophysicist in the 1980s, Rob Holman attended a conference in San Francisco that included a field trip to a beach. Dr. Holman, who grew up inland, in Ottawa, stared at the ocean, assessing the strengths and vectors of the waves and currents. But when he looked around, everyone else was studying the sand.
He realized, he recalled, that "sand is not the same everywhere." So he started collecting it. "I collected a few samples and put them in jars," he said. "Then I had so many I built a rack. Then I built three more racks. Then I built four more."
Today Dr. Holman is best known as a coastal oceanographer at Oregon State University whose computerized photography system, called Argus, has given researchers new ways to observe and measure beaches. But he still collects sand, which he displays on shelves in the corridor outside his office.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
President Bush will create three new marine national monuments in the Pacific Ocean today, according to his top aides, a move that will help preserve sprawling sea and island ecosystems and cement the one aspect of his legacy that has won praise, sometimes grudgingly, from many environmentalists.
Bush's decision to safeguard far-flung areas totaling 195,280 square miles, which comes just two weeks before he leaves office, underscores his contradictory environmental record. While he has resisted imposing mandatory curbs on greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change and has opened large areas of the nation to drilling, mining and other use of resources, by the end of his term he will have protected more ocean than any person in history.
Invoking powers of the Antiquities Act of 1906 that are used to protect statues and cultural sites, Bush will sharply restrict oil and gas exploration and commercial fishing around numerous remote islands in the central and western Pacific that have long been U.S. possessions. Scientists identified them as biologically and geologically rich areas.
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from the Houston Chronicle
CHICAGO (Associated Press)—Parkinson's sufferers who had electrodes implanted in their brains improved substantially more than those who took only medicine, according to the biggest test yet of deep brain stimulation.
The study, which followed patients for six months, offers the most hopeful news to date for Parkinson's sufferers. The new technique reduced tremors, rigidity and flailing of the limbs and allowed people to move freely for nearly five extra hours a day.
But the research also revealed higher-than-expected risks. About 40 percent of the patients who received these "brain pacemakers" suffered serious side effects, including a surprising number of falls with injuries.
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from BBC News Online
The planet Jupiter must have gained mass fast during its infancy, according to astronomers. It had to, because the material from which the planet formed disappeared in just a few million years. After studying other stars, the US team came to the conclusion that gas giants like Jupiter must grow rapidly.
Details of the group's work were outlined at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), held in Long Beach, California. Astronomers examined the five million-year-old star cluster NGC 2362 with Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope.
Spitzer can detect the signatures of actively forming planets in infrared light. The research team found that all stars with the mass of the Sun or greater have lost their "proto-planetary," or planet-forming, discs.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
NEW ORLEANS—Zack Lemann opened the thick acrylic terrarium marked "Dung Beetles" and began poking around in the dirt and, uh, beetle food with the delicate vigor of a practiced surgeon. A moment later he emerged with a piece of live jewelry balanced on his fingertip: Phanaeus vindex, the rainbow scarab. "Isn't it a beauty?" Mr. Lemann said proudly. "Purple, green and gold—as close to Mardi Gras colors as you can get."
Its party armor isn't the only trait that suits Phanaeus to its bayou setting. For the ancient Egyptians, the sacred scarab symbolized resurrection and self-invention, the power to tunnel out from the tar-pit grip of the earth and back into the agile light of morning, and who better to counsel rebirth in the wake of inundation and obliteration than a civilization built on the floodplains of the Nile?
Here at the boisterous new Audubon Insectarium, a $25 million private nonprofit venture located on the shank of the French Quarter, metaphors and messages are easy to find, coin and liberally mix.
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from Science News
LONG BEACH, Calif.—Hey Andromeda, you’d better watch out. Turns out your little brother, the Milky Way galaxy, isn’t so little after all. In fact, the Milky Way is just as massive, weighing in at the new estimate of 3 trillion suns, according to a new study.
That means that the two galaxies—the largest members of the Local Group of galaxies—might smash into each other earlier than astronomers had predicted.
To map the Milky Way, the new study uses the Very Long Baseline Array of 10 radio telescopes stretched out over thousands of miles. Unlike visible-light observations, which are obscured by interstellar dust, radio studies enable astronomers to penetrate through dusty byways.
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from New Scientist
It is one of the most studied parts of the world, and played a major part in shaping Darwin's thinking about the origin of species—yet the Galapagos Islands continue to give more to our understanding of biology.
It was finches that led Darwin to understand that species could change with environmental pressures, and now genetic analysis has revealed that a long-overlooked pink iguana is a species in its own right and may be one of the earliest examples of species diversification on the islands.
Galapagos land iguanas belong to the genus Conolophus, of which there are currently three recognised species. Remarkably, given their colour, pink iguanas were apparently not seen until they were noticed by park rangers in 1986. They are sometimes known as "rosada" iguanas, from the Spanish for pink.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
... While eagerly awaited by people who cannot walk, neuroprosthetics such as implantable electrodes have also captured the imagination of those who fantasize about carrying out actions with their minds alone. Imagine walking into your classroom and turning on the lights, then flicking through your Powerpoint slides with a thought.
For a brain neuroprosthetic to work, surgeons implant an electrode into brain tissue which records signals. ... Wires from the electrodes pass through the skull and a skullcap, transmitting the signals to devices such as a computer or electric limb outside the body which carry out the brain's command.
For researchers working on developing neuroprosthetics, brain implants have always been the holy grail: the signal is cleaner and more precise, the connection is direct. But the fantastic sci-fi world of controlling things with your thoughts alone ... is still stumbling on the first step: recording a clean signal from the brain over an extended period.
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from the Scientific American
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) late last year released its new Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, calling for adults between the ages of 18 and 64 to exercise moderately (such as brisk walking or water aerobics) for at least two hours and 30 minutes or vigorously (running, swimming, or cycling 10 mph or faster) for at least an hour and 15 minutes weekly.
The longer, harder and more often you exercise, the greater the health benefits, including reducing the risk of diseases such as cancer and diabetes, according to the recommendations, which were based on a decade of scientific research.
Studies have shown that people who engage in the amount of exercise recommended by the feds live an average of three to seven years longer than couch potatoes, according to William Haskell, a medical professor at Stanford University who chaired the HHS advisory committee. But how exactly does exercise accomplish this? And what about claims by naysayers that exercise not only isn't healthy but may actually be bad for you? Is there any truth to them
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from USA Today
A flotilla of recent studies—including two papers published today—has sunk the notion that individual vitamin supplements prevent cancer. With so many earlier studies suggesting that people can eat their way to longer lives, experts acknowledge that their latest findings may leave people confused and even frustrated.
"A lot of people are looking at this and asking, 'What happened?'" says Lori Minasian, whose study in today's Journal of the American Medical Association found that taking vitamin E or selenium does not ward off cancer.
But researchers also say that diet is one of the most difficult areas to study. Unlike lab rats, after all, no one eats one thing all the time.
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from the Scientific American
... One of the most common misconceptions about brain evolution is that it represents a linear process culminating in the amazing cognitive powers of humans, with the brains of other modern species representing previous stages. Such ideas have even influenced the thinking of neuroscientists and psychologists who compare the brains of different species used in biomedical research.
Over the past 30 years, however, research in comparative neuroanatomy clearly has shown that complex brains—and sophisticated cognition—have evolved from simpler brains multiple times independently in separate lineages, or evolutionarily related groups: in mollusks such as octopuses, squid and cuttlefish; in bony fishes such as goldfish and, separately again, in cartilaginous fishes such as sharks and manta rays; and in reptiles and birds.
Nonmammals have demonstrated advanced abilities such as learning by copying the behavior of others, finding their way in complicated spatial environments, manufacturing and using tools, and even conducting mental time travel .... Collectively, these findings are helping scientists to understand how intelligence can arise—and to appreciate the many forms it can take.
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from the New York Times Magazine (Registration Required)
There aren't many widely told anecdotes about the current financial crisis, at least not yet, but there’s one that made the rounds in 2007, back when the big investment banks were first starting to write down billions of dollars in mortgage-backed derivatives and other so-called toxic securities.
... Before, that is, it became obvious that the risks taken by the largest banks and investment firms in the United States—and, indeed, in much of the Western world—were so excessive and foolhardy that they threatened to bring down the financial system itself. On the contrary: this was back when the major investment firms were still assuring investors that all was well, these little speed bumps notwithstanding—assurances based, in part, on their fantastically complex mathematical models for measuring the risk in their various portfolios.
There are many such models, but by far the most widely used is called VaR—Value at Risk. Built around statistical ideas and probability theories that have been around for centuries, VaR was developed and popularized in the early 1990s by a handful of scientists and mathematicians—"quants," they're called in the business—who went to work for JPMorgan. VaR's great appeal, and its great selling point to people who do not happen to be quants, is that it expresses risk as a single number, a dollar figure, no less.
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from the Economist
..."One great blooming, buzzing confusion" was how William James, a 19th-century psychologist, described the way he thought the world looked to a newborn baby.
But experiments ... have convinced researchers that, on the contrary, babies are born with many ways of making sense of what they see and hear. The trick is to use their love of novelty to work out what is happening inside their brains: when shown the same things repeatedly, babies’ eyes wander; when the scene changes, their gaze returns. That makes visible what to them constitutes a change in the world around them worthy of notice.
One of those ways of understanding the world is by number. People are born with an innate sense of how many items there are in small collections. Experiments in which older children and adults are shown randomly arranged dots and asked to say quickly how many there are show this sense is retained throughout life.
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from Science News
LONG BEACH, Calif.—Astronomers have produced the sharpest infrared portrait of the central 300 light-years of the Milky Way, showing details as small as 20 times the length of the solar system.
Seen in visible light, much of the crowded core is cloaked in dust clouds. But infrared light penetrates the dust, providing a clear view of this turbulent region, which houses a supermassive black hole at its very center and lies 26,000 light-years from Earth.
The false-color composite combines ultrasharp images taken at short infrared wavelengths by the Hubble Space Telescope with lower-resolution images taken at longer infrared wavelengths by the Spitzer Space Telescope.
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from Smithsonian Magazine
The term “hysteria” comes from the Greek word for "womb" and refers to a disease that was once diagnosed almost exclusively in women. Women's asthma, widow's melancholy, uterine epilepsy—these were all synonyms for a strange complex of symptoms that included unexplained pains, mysterious convulsions, sudden loss of sensation in the limbs and dozens of other complaints without apparent physical cause.
Particularly during the Victorian age, doctors thought hysteria demonstrated the general fragility of the fair sex. The best remedy was a good marriage. But all the while untold numbers of men were suffering from the same illness.
In his new book, Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness, Mark Micale, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Illinois, explores the medical tradition of ignoring masculine "hysteria," and its cultural consequences.
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from the BBC News Online
The US space agency's (Nasa) Mars rovers are celebrating a remarkable five years on the Red Planet. The first robot, named Spirit, landed on 3 January, 2004, followed by its twin, Opportunity, 21 days later.
It was hoped the robots would work for at least three months; but their longevity in the freezing Martian conditions has surprised everyone. The rovers' data has revealed much about the history of water at Mars' equator billions of years ago.
These rovers are incredibly resilient considering the extreme environment the hardware experiences every day," said John Callas, project manager for Spirit and Opportunity at Nasa's Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California.
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