In Race for World's Fastest Supercomputer, U.S. Lab Deploys a Titan
The power of Titan, a supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, is akin to each of the world’s 7 billion people being able to carry out 3 million calculations per second.
In a breakthrough that harnesses video-game technology for solving science's most complex mysteries, a U.S. government laboratory today deployed Titan—the fastest, most powerful, and most energy-efficient of a new generation of supercomputers that breach the bounds of "central processing unit" computing. |  |
$10 Million Bigfoot Bounty Backs New Show
An upcoming TV show is offering $10 million for irrefutable proof of Bigfoot and people are lining up for their shot at making television history.
According to a story in The Hollywood Reporter, “Spike TV announced Thursday a 10-episode pickup for 10 Million Dollar Big Foot Bounty, a new reality competition that's offering what would be the largest cash prize in TV history. The only catch is that the titular $10 million, backed by insurers of the bizarre at Lloyd's of London, can only be awarded to a contestant that provides irrefutable evidence that that Big Foot exists. |  |
Maths and nature link 'proven' by Manchester scientists
The largest ever research project into mathematical patterns in flowers has proved a link between number sequences and nature, Manchester scientists said.
Hundreds of volunteers worldwide grew sunflowers as part of the project led by the city's Museum of Science and Industry and university. Scientists aimed to test the theory of Manchester-based computer pioneer Alan Turing, who died in 1954. |  |
Arctic thaw will release 850 billion tonnes carbon, says latest study
NEW DELHI: Global warming just spun more out of control than thought. As much as 44 billion tons of nitrogen and 850 billion tons of carbon stored in the frozen wastes of Arctic could be released into the environment as the region begins to thaw over the next century, a new study led by the US Geological Survey said. The thawing process has already started with sea-ice levels at their lowest this summer.
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Is the Dead Sea dying? Water loss continues at record rate
The Dead Sea is shrinking at a record rate, prompting calls for Israel and Jordan to stop fertilizer makers from siphoning so much of the water whose restorative powers have attracted visitors since biblical times.
The salty inland lake bordering the nations dropped a record 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) over the last 12 months because of industry use and evaporation, the Hydrological Service of Israel said. That's the steepest Dead Sea decline since data-keeping started in the 1950s. Half the drop was caused by Israel Chemicals Ltd. and Jordan's Arab Potash Co., said Gidon Bromberg, Israeli director of the Friends of Earth Middle East. |  |
Uncertainty of Future South Pacific Island Rainfall Explained
With greenhouse warming, rainfall in the South Pacific islands will depend on two competing effects -- an increase due to overall warming and a decrease due to changes in atmospheric water transport -- according to a study by an international team of scientists around Matthew Widlansky and Axel Timmermann at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa. In the South Pacific, the study shows, these two effects sometimes cancel each other out, resulting in highly uncertain rainfall projections.
Results of the study are published in the 28 October online issue of Nature Climate Change. |  |
Real-life tractor beam developed at NYU
Physicists at New York University have demonstrated a micro-tractor beam capable of pushing and pulling molecules.
The system by David B. Ruffner and David G. Grier consists of a set of superimposed Bessel beams—beams which do not spread and are capable of self healing after partial obstruction—which is able to push and pull tiny objects along its length.
The system by David B. Ruffner and David G. Grier consists of a set of superimposed Bessel beams—beams which do not spread and are capable of self healing after partial obstruction—which is able to push and pull tiny objects along its length.
Golden solution to inexpensive test for HIV
Gold usually means extravagance, but now it could be the key to making vital medical tests cheaper.
People in poor countries often do not get timely treatment for cancer or infections, because diagnostic tests that can spot diseases early are too expensive. Now, a team at Imperial College London have figured out that gold could be the solution. |  |
Modern alchemy leaches gold from water
A small French start-up company is selling a technology with a hint of alchemy: turning water into gold.
It does so by extracting from industrial waste water the last traces of any rare—and increasingly valuable—metal. |  |
Sweden wants Norway's trash (and lots of it)
Sweden is hungry for trash and has turned to Norway for an offer it would find hard to refuse, no pun intended. Sweden is asking its neighbor for trash. Sweden's success is Sweden's problem. Sweden is a model recycler. Thanks to a highly efficient waste management system in Sweden, the vast majority of this household waste can be recovered or reused. As a result, Sweden has run short of garbage. Since it does not produce enough burnable waste for its energy needs, Sweden is suffering a downside to being such an enviable model of recycling. The average in Europe of trash that ends up as waste is 38 percent. Sweden's is 1 percent.
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NASA Building Deep-Space Habitat From Spare ISS Parts
Deep-space engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Texas are putting together a prototype of a deep space station from scrap parts of the ISS.
The Deep Space Habitat project is an attempt to work out optimum size of capsule, equipment and resources to send outside of the Earth-Moon system and into deep space. That could be to Mars, to an asteroid, or even to one of the solar system’s many Lagrangian points.
The Deep Space Habitat project is an attempt to work out optimum size of capsule, equipment and resources to send outside of the Earth-Moon system and into deep space. That could be to Mars, to an asteroid, or even to one of the solar system’s many Lagrangian points.
L'Aquila ruling: Should scientists stop giving advice?
This week six scientists and one government official were sentenced to six years in prison for manslaughter, for making "falsely reassuring" comments before the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake. But was this fair?
First, we have to understand limits of earthquake science. Ian Main, Professor of Seismology and Rock Physics at the University of Edinburgh, was part of an international commission on earthquake forecasting set up after L'Aquila.
First, we have to understand limits of earthquake science. Ian Main, Professor of Seismology and Rock Physics at the University of Edinburgh, was part of an international commission on earthquake forecasting set up after L'Aquila.
The earth's magnetic field impacts climate: Danish study
COPENHAGEN (AFP) — The earth's climate has been significantly affected by the planet's magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming.
"Our results show a strong correlation between the strength of the earth's magnetic field and the amount of precipitation in the tropics," one of the two Danish geophysicists behind the study, Mads Faurschou Knudsen of the geology department at Aarhus University in western Denmark, told the Videnskab journal. |  |
Can humans cause an earthquake?
One of the things people often wonder about earthquakes is whether human activity can play a role in their occurrence. Sometimes that comes from a desire to assign blame, but often it’s related to a bigger question: could we actively trigger small earthquakes to prevent the big, damaging ones from occurring? While that lofty piece of geoengineering may not be feasible (or even possible), it is true that humans can sometimes trigger earthquakes.
Mayans Pissed Off Over Doomsday 'Deceit'
The 'golden age' of the Mayan civilization may have occurred over 1,000 years ago, but more than half the population of the Central American nation of Guatemala are of Mayan descent and many still celebrate ancient customs. So, as we approach Dec. 21, 2012, it's little wonder they're pissed that one of their calendars has been hijacked and misinterpreted as a prophet of doom.
But this time, the anger isn't directed at the West's "messianic thinking," Maya leaders have accused the Guatemalan government of perpetuating the myth that the Mayan Long Count calendar predicts the end of the world for financial gain. |  |
Why werewolves give us the willies
Linda Godfrey is so sure about the existence of weird walking wolves that she's written a book titled "Real Wolfmen: True Encounters in Modern America." In more than 300 pages, she lays out dozens of stories about sightings of nasty-looking beasts running around on their hairy hind legs. Scientists are unconvinced — but they do admit that humans are virtually hard-wired to watch out for wolves on the darkness.
"The werewolf idea is strictly a product of our imagination, but it comes along with a culture of thousands of years of fear of wolves," said Michigan Tech's Rolf Peterson, who has studied wolves for decades at Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. "It's just an outgrowth of that. But there's nothing out there that's anything like a werewolf. It's all in our heads.". |  |
Before Salem, There Was the Not-So-Wicked Witch of the Hamptons
Thirty-five years before the infamous events of Salem, allegations of witchcraft and a subsequent trial rocked a small colonial village.
The place was Easthampton, New York. Now a summer resort for the rich and famous—and spelled as two words, East Hampton—at the time it was an English settlement on the remote, eastern tip of Long Island. |  |
From the 'X Files': "ET Technology Could Exist That's Beyond Matter"
Stephen Hawking warned recently that contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization could have dire consequences for the human species. Arthur C Clarke once made the famous observation that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.
Following in their footsteps, world renowned experts from physicist Sir Martin Rees of Cambridge University to astrobiologist Paul Davis of Arizona State have asked if we were to encounter alien technology far superior to our own, would we even realize what it was. A technology a million or more years in advance of ours could appear miraculous. |  |
Caveman Diet: Stone Age Humans Ate Less Meat Than Previously Thought
That image of a caveman gnawing on a hunk of bison meat may need a makeover. A new chemical analysis of modern diets suggests Stone Age humans ate less meat than thought.
The findings, published in the November issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, may explain why many archaeologists estimate that prehistoric people got most of their calories from lean meat or fish when modern humans would be literally poisoned by such a protein-heavy diet. |  |
Tsunami hit Geneva in AD 563: scientists
PARIS — Nearly 1,500 years ago a tsunami triggered by a rockfall swept Lake Geneva, engulfing its shores with a wall of water up to 13 metres (42 feet) high, Swiss scientists reported on Sunday.
The incident suggests Geneva and Lausanne remain vulnerable today, as do other cities on the edge of mountain lakes and high-sided fjords, they said. "The risk is underestimated because most of the people just do not know that tsunamis can happen in lakes," Katrina Kremer, an Earth scientist at the University of Geneva, told AFP. |  |
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