Really fascinating. Even though I thought they had detected it when Dick Cheney was in the White House 
Has dark matter finally been detected?
Hunt may well be over for mysterious and invisible substance that accounts for three-quarters of mass of universe
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A computer simulation shows how invisible dark matter coalesces in halos (shown in yellow). Photograph: Science Photo Library |
For 80 years, it has eluded the finest minds in science. But tonight it appeared that the hunt may be over for dark matter, the mysterious and invisible substance that accounts for three-quarters of the mass of the universe. |
In a series of coordinated announcements at several US laboratories, researchers said they believed they had captured dark matter in a defunct iron ore mine half a mile underground. The claim, if confirmed next year, will rank as one the most spectacular discoveries in physics in the past century. |
Tantalising glimpses of dark matter particles were picked up by highly sensitive detectors at the bottom of the Soudan mine in Minnesota, the scientists said. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk |
| Everything from the concept of the black hole to GPS timing owes a debt to the theory of general relativity, which describes how gravity arises from the geometry of space and time. The sun’s gravitational field, for instance, bends starlight passing nearby because its mass is warping the surrounding space-time. TRead more at www.newscientist.com |
I caught this article in Tim O’Reillys tweet a bit earlier. It made me think the T-1000 is being launched, well….least something that reminds me of it. iRobot’s oozy ChemBot amazes and terrifies |
For now, it’s palm-size, sure, but what if something terrible happens, and it can’t stop inflating? |
We’re getting a first glimpse of that shape-shifting ChemBot we first told you about last year, and well, it looks like the love child of a beating heart and a wad of Silly Putty.
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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Research Office awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to iRobot to create the flexible military bot. The maker of the Roomba and Scooba, along with University of Chicago researchers, showed off the oozy results at the Iros conference (the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in St. Louis this week.
Read more at news.cnet.com |
Impressive, but it seems if one looks back at the ancient Greeks or in the Biblical stories, people lived to be a 125+ years old, so living till 100 yo still is not that impressive. Again, it amazes me that humans have figured ways to take a life or lives in a matter of a few seconds, yet we have not put our intelligence to use and figured away to extend a peaceful co-existence of life for more than 150+ years. Today’s babies could live to 22nd century: study |
PARIS — More than half of the babies born today in rich countries will live to 100 years if current trends of life expectancy continue, a study appearing in the medical journal The Lancet said on Friday. |
In the 20th century, most developed countries saw an increase of around 30 years in life expectancy, according to the paper led by Kaare Christensen, a professor at the Danish Ageing Research Centre at the University of Southern Denmark. |
In 1950, only 15-16 percent of 80-year-old women, and just 12 percent of octogenarian men, made it to the age of 90 in advanced economies. |
In 2002, this had risen to 37 percent and 25 percent respectively. In Japan, the survival rate from 80 to 90 is now more than 50 percent for women. Read more at www.google.com |
This sounds like a cool and exciting field of study! Where will synthetic biology lead us? |
The first time Jay Keasling remembers hearing the word “artemisinin,” about a decade ago, he had no idea what it meant. “Not a clue,” Keasling, a professor of biochemical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, recalled. Although artemisinin has become the world’s most important malaria medicine, Keasling wasn’t an expert on infectious diseases. But he happened to be in the process of creating a new discipline, synthetic biology, which—by combining elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science, and molecular biology—seeks to assemble the biological tools necessary to redesign the living world. Read more at www.newyorker.com |
Now add in regular excercise and I wonder what would happen to the free radicals. They don’t mention if the subjects were permitted or encouraged to excercise. |
Proof mounts on restricted diet
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| Cutting calories may delay the ageing process and reduce the risk of disease, a long-term study of monkeys suggests. |
The benefits of calorie restriction are well documented in animals, but now the results have been replicated in a close relative of man over a lengthy period. |
Over 20 years, monkeys whose diets were not restricted were nearly three times more likely to have died than those whose calories were counted. |
Writing in Science, the US researchers hailed the “major effect” of the diet. |
It involved reducing calorie intake by 30% while maintaining nutrition and appeared to impact upon many forms of age-related disease seen in monkeys, including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and brain atrophy. Read more at news.bbc.co.uk |
| Scientists claim to have grown human sperm in a lab, and columnists and bloggers are musing on the possibility of a world where men are no longer needed. |
is not looking forward to the prospect of a world that doesn’t need men. |
| But if - and it is still a big if - scientists could one day use cells from female embryos to produce sperm, or perhaps even DNA extracted from an adult’s skin or cheek-lining cells, then we truly would be living in a terrifying new era. |
The editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics
John Harris
says in the Independent that he sees nothing wrong with exercising choice but the real ethical issue isn’t about the prospect of a world without men. Read more at news.bbc.co.uk |
I knew Tunguska was more than they let it on to be 
If you want to read an excellent thriller on Tunguska see a friend of mine’s book http://singularitythebook.com/thebooks/singularity/
Bill’s spin on the event is more interesting….. Russian Scientist: UFO Crashed Into Meteorite to Save Earth |
| Did a UFO deliberately crash into a meteor to save Earth 100 years ago? That’s what one Russian scientist is claiming. |
Dr. Yuri Labvin, president of the Tunguska Spatial Phenomenon Foundation, insists that an alien spacecraft sacrificed itself to prevent a gigantic meteor from slamming into the planet above Siberia on June 30, 1908. |
The result was was the Tunguska event, a massive blast estimated at 15 megatons that downed 80 million trees over nearly 100 square miles. Eyewitnesses reported a bright light and a huge shock wave, but the area was so sparsely populated no one was killed. Read more at www.foxnews.com |
This is exciting and a bit scary at the same time. Thinking what if when these glaciers melt, that microbes that might have wiped out the planet long ago are unleashed and the planet is again wiped out of mankind?
Perhaps sci-fi thinking, but heck maybe we will find some unique things to help solve cancer or other diseases. Maybe there will be some other interesting findings there. Ancient microbes discovered alive beneath Antarctic glacier |
(CNN) — Beneath an Antarctic glacier in a cold, airless pool that never sees the sun seems like an unusual place to search for life. |
But under the Taylor Glacier on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, near a place called Blood Falls, scientists have discovered a time capsule of bacterial activity. |
At chilling temperatures, with no oxygen or sunlight, these newly found microbes have survived for the past 1.5 million years using an “iron-breathing” technique, which may show how life could exist on other planets. Read more at www.cnn.com |
They are known as “quants” because they do quantitative finance. Seduced by a vision of mathematical elegance underlying some of the messiest of human activities, they apply skills they once hoped to use to untangle string theory or the nervous system to making money. |
Still others have opened an academic front, using complexity theory or artificial intelligence to better understand the behavior of humans in markets. In December the physics Web site arXiv.org, where physicists post their papers, added a section for papers on finance. Submissions on subjects like “the superstatistics of labor productivity” and “stochastic volatility models” have been streaming in. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
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Has dark matter finally been detected?
