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Electron microscope spots hydrogen atoms resting on invisible carbon sheet. The smallest of atoms can now be seen sitting in splendid isolation with a standard transmission electron microscope, thanks to the most fashionable form of carbon, graphene. The technique, developed by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, could help to produce images of individual molecules in atomic detail using relatively conventional laboratory kit. The research is reported in this week's Nature1. A transmission electron microscope (TEM) works by firing a beam of electrons through a very thin sample supported by a scaffold....

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft has created a video of the moon transiting (passing in front of) Earth as seen from the spacecraft's point of view 31 million miles away. Scientists are using the video to develop techniques to study alien worlds. "Making a video of Earth from so far away helps the search for other life-bearing planets in the Universe by giving insights into how a distant, Earth-like alien world would appear to us," said University of Maryland astronomer Michael A’Hearn, principal investigator for the Deep Impact extended mission, called EPOXI. Timelapse image of the Moon...

Land-ice Bridge, New Research Suggests -- Research by a Valparaiso University geography professor and his students on the creation of Kankakee Sand Islands of Northwest Indiana is lending support to evidence that the first humans to settle the Americas came from Europe, a discovery that overturns decades of classroom lessons that nomadic tribes from Asia crossed a Bering Strait land-ice bridge. Valparaiso is a member of the Council on Undergraduate Research. Dr. Ron Janke began studying the origins of the Kankakee Sand Islands – a series of hundreds of small, moon-shaped dunes that stretch from the southern tips of Lake...

PARIS (AFP) - Water bathed the surface of southern Mars for millions of years, helping to create an environment theoretically capable of nurturing life, according to a new study into the planet's mysterious oceans. Scientists at Brown University in Rhode Island used an instrument aboard a US spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to hunt for traces of phyllosilicates, or clay-like minerals that preserve a record of water's interaction with rocks. They found phyllosilicates in thousands of places, in valleys, dunes and craters in the ancient southern highlands, pointing to an active role by water in Mars's earliest geological era, the...

A New Frontier for Title IX: Science Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science. --snip-- “Colleges already practice affirmative action for women in science, but now they’ll be so intimidated by the Title IX legal hammer that they may institute quota systems,” Dr. Sommers said. “In sports, they had to eliminate a lot of male teams to achieve Title IX parity. It’ll be devastating to American science if every male-dominated field...

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science. The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland. So far, these Title IX compliance reviews...

Alberto Morpurgo and his team of researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands recently attached a micrometer-thick crystal of an organic polymer to a similarly thin organic crystal of a second polymer creating a thin but strongly conducting channel along the junction that acts like a metal. The discovery could lead to a whole new way of making electronics from non-metallic materials, and even new superconductors.   Dr Alberto Morpurgo (Credit: TU Delft’s Kavli Institute of Nanoscience) The thin, flexible crystals which conform to each others’ shape and stick together due to van der Waals forces are both...

In 1999, seismographs detected a swarm of earthquakes at a spot on the Gakkel ridge, a midocean ridge that traverses the Arctic. A few expeditions to the area, north of Siberia about 350 miles from the pole, produced indirect evidence of explosive eruptions deep on the seafloor. Explosive volcanism at such depths would be very unusual, said Robert A. Sohn of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “People had been afraid to even suggest it, because it seemed so ludicrous.” Seafloor volcanoes do erupt violently, but in relatively shallow water. The Gakkel ridge spot is 13,000 feet down, and...

An important prediction available from the RC theory states that there will be a major drop in the sun's activity measured by an historic reduction in sunspots and other indicators of the sun's behavior. Accompaning this lower state of the sun called a 'solar minimum' by the solar physics community, will be a prolonged cold era according to the SSRC. This next climate change to many years of a slowly cooling Earth environment, is predicted by the SSRC to begin within the period 2010 to 2021 with lowest temperatures during the bottom around the year 2031. The SSRC refers to...

Rapid changes in the churning movement of Earth's liquid outer core are weakening the magnetic field in some regions of the planet's surface, a new study says. "What is so surprising is that rapid, almost sudden, changes take place in the Earth's magnetic field," said study co-author Nils Olsen, a geophysicist at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen. The findings suggest similarly quick changes are simultaneously occurring in the liquid metal, 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) below the surface, he said. The swirling flow of molten iron and nickel around Earth's solid center triggers an electrical current, which generates the...

Neither faith nor science can answer the most important questions. So why are believers and atheists still bickering? I went to a debate recently in New York between a rabbi and the famous polemicist Christopher Hitchens, on the question "Does God exist?" Hitchens was called on to speak first, and he won the debate with his first two sentences: "I don't know why I have to speak first. He has the burden of proof." The mostly secular ... audience heartily applauded this sally, which was based on the premise -- never challenged by the rabbi -- that science provides an...

The molecular surface of IDE is represented by light yellow. The N- and C-terminal domains of IDE are colored green and red, respectively. The beta-amyloid (blue) is entrapped inside the degradation chamber of the IDE molecule. Yuequan Shen, Univ. of Chicago Researchers from the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory have deciphered the three-dimensional structure of insulin-degrading enzyme, a promising target for new drugs because it breaks down not only insulin but also the amyloid-beta protein, which has been linked to the cognitive decline of Alzheimer's disease. In the October 19, 2006, issue of Nature (available online Oct. 11),...

Another National Security Threat by: Melinda Zosh, July 08, 2008 With the Olympics quickly approaching, the world’s eyes are on China and its rising power as a world influence. Experts at the Heritage Foundation recently said that China now has the third largest economy in the world; it is the second largest after the U.S. In addition, 2003 marked the first year China’s GDP reached over one trillion dollars; it hit 1.4 trillion dollars, to be exact. China is a top steel, aluminum and fine copper producer. It has the world’s second largest auto market. But even more importantly, China...

July 08, 2008, 6:00 a.m. Louisiana Confounds the Science Thought PoliceNeo-Darwinism is no longer a protected orthodoxy in the Bayou State's pedagogy. By John G. West To the chagrin of the science thought police, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has signed into law an act to protect teachers who want to encourage critical thinking about hot-button science issues such as global warming, human cloning, and yes, evolution and the origin of life. Opponents allege that the Louisiana Science Education Act is “anti-science.� In reality, the opposition’s efforts to silence anyone who disagrees with them is the true affront to scientific...

Engineer Gets 110 MPG Out Of '87 Mustang Ohio Man Competing For $10M Prize POSTED: 10:21 am EDT July 2, 2008 UPDATED: 11:07 am EDT July 2, 2008 Doug Pelmear said he isn't toying with the engine of 1987 Ford Mustang for the money. The engineer's tinkering, however, could earn him $10 million and save him plenty more in gas money. Pelmear, who lives in Napoleon, Ohio, has tweaked his Mustang to get 110 mpg, making the engine nearly five times as efficient as a traditional gas engine, he told the Toledo Blade newspaper. "We redesigned a lot of different...

The Martian soil uncovered by the 'Phoenix' Mars Lander might not be that different from the dirt in your own backyard. In fact, you might even be able to grow asparagus in it, mission officials said. The UA-led mission conducted the first ever wet-chemistry experiments done on another planet yesterday. 'Phoenix' tested the soil's chemical properties, like pH and mineral content, by mixing it with water in its onboard labs. The first experiment showed that Mars' soil has some of the basic nutrients needed to support life and is, in some respects, very earth-like, said Sam Kounaves, the mission's wet-chemistry...

Earth emits an ear-piercing series of chirps and whistles that could be heard by any aliens who might be listening, if they're out there. The sound is awful, a new recording from space reveals. Scientists have known about the radiation since the 1970s. It is created high above the planet, where charged particles from the solar wind collide with Earth's magnetic field. • Click here to hear the sounds. It is related to the phenomenon that generates the colorful aurora, or Northern Lights. The radio waves are blocked by the ionosphere, a charged layer atop our atmosphere, so they do...

The crevo threads typically degenerate into name calling. Recently, the Religion Moderator declared that "science is not religion", and did not publish the criteria for such consideration. My suggestion to the evolutionist community has been to acknowledge that Scientism is a religion and start to utilize the protections offered under the religion tags that are different than other threads (due to the intensity of feelings over religious issues). So this thread is intended to be an ECUMENICAL thread under the tag of SCIENTISM. The intent is to keep discussion civil. I would like to see a straightforward discussion over the...

A drug developed using nanotechnology and a fungus that contaminated a lab experiment may be broadly effective against a range of cancers, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday. The drug, called lodamin, was improved in one of the last experiments overseen by Dr. Judah Folkman, a cancer researcher who died in January. Folkman pioneered the idea of angiogenesis therapy -- starving tumors by preventing them from growing blood supplies. (snip) "I had never expected such a strong effect on these aggressive tumor models," she said. The researchers believe lodamin may also be useful in other diseases marked by abnormal blood vessel...

Pistol may hand advantage to those closest to the starting official.Most competitions use individual speakers so everyone hears the same starting blast.Ingram Publishing (Superstock Limited) / Alamy The Olympics may not be the bastion of pure sporting contest that people might think. Although the pistol used to start sprint events in the Games might make good theatre, it may mean that sprinters in lane 1, nearest the gun, get away from the blocks faster. Most international athletics competitions use speakers behind each athlete to broadcast the start signal. The Olympics uses this system but also increases the drama of the...

The most dramatic cosmic impact in recent history has gathered up almost as many weird explanations as it knocked down trees, writes Duncan Steel. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. On June 30, 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometers — a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe. So begins Rendezvous with Rama , a 1972 novel by Arthur C. Clarke in which mankind learns the hard way about the dangers posed by incoming asteroids. The 2077 impact in northern Italy that Clarke goes on to describe is fictional: the 1908...

Ancient Eclipse Found in "The Odyssey," Scientists SayRichard A. Lovett for National Geographic NewsJune 23, 2008 "The sun has perished out of heaven, and an evil mist has overspread the world." With those words in The Odyssey, Homer laid down not a prophecy of doom but a description of a real-world total solar eclipse, scientific sleuths announced today. It has been known for decades that there was only one such eclipse during the time period Homer wrote about in the ancient Greek poem—on April 16, 1178 B.C. The blackout even occurred at noon, as described in the epic poem. But...

Are the ices of the Arctic north about to melt away for good? Rami Abdelrahman gets the views of a range of Swedish researchers. Sweden’s Crown Princess Victoria is one of a number of Scandinavian royals making for the Arctic archipelago on the Swedish ice-breaker Oden this weekend to participate in an event to coincide with and promote International Polar Year. But will there even be a need for such ice-breaking vessels in years to come? Many commentators would have us believe that glaciers and ocean ice are about to go the way of the dodo. Upon their arrival at...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Scientific detective work has uncovered a decades-old glitch in ocean temperature measurements and revealed that the world's seas are warming and rising faster than previously reported. Fellow report author John Church said he had long been suspicious about the historical data because it did not match results from computer models of the world's climate and oceans. "We've realigned the observations and as a result the models agree with the observations much better than previously," said Church, a senior research scientist with the climate centre.

Droughts, heavy rain, heat waves, wildfires and intense hurricanes are more likely to affect North America because of global warming's effect on extreme weather, the Bush Administration's Climate Change Science Program said Thursday. There's high confidence that the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events has already been influenced by global warming, and even greater confidence that more expensive, damaging and deadly weather is to come as temperatures continue to rise. The risk is tied directly to human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. The findings are familiar, but the report is the...

Hopeful Science by: Ben Giles, June 20, 2008 Last October, the Center for American Progress launched a new online publication called Science Progress. Their progressive vision for scientific research has now made it to print. On June 13, the Center held a miniature science fair and panel discussion to launch the Spring-Summer edition of Progress, the first print release of the increasingly popular publication. “This first journal edition of Science Progress is yet another step we are taking to ensure that the American people realize that ‘science is the stuff of progress,’” said Center President John D. Podesta. The online...

THERE IS A SURE-FIRE WAY to make the news these days: Just issue a press release beginning with the words, "New scientific study shows," and have it assert a conclusion that the MSM fervently want to believe--especially if the resulting story would serve to debunk or refute a Bush administration policy. Slam-dunk! Your press release will become news! You are skeptical, you say? But what other explanation is there for the decision by CBS and MSNBC to post on their websites a ridiculous story about a new scientific "finding" that global warming is causing an increase in the world's earthquakes--an...

A new type of solar energy collector concentrates the sun into a beam that could melt steel. Researchers say the device could revolutionize global energy production. The prototype is a 12-foot-wide mirrored dish was made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror. It concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000 to produce steam. "This is actually the most efficient solar collector in existence," said Doug Wood, an inventor based in Washington state who patented key parts of the dish's design - the rights to which he has signed over to a team of students...

Walk the halls of the computer science buildings on college campuses across the United States and you'll notice a peculiar thing: there are very few women. At a time when women are swelling enrollments in many other university departments, computer science is conspicuous for its lack of female students. Worse, percentages of female bachelor degrees earned in computer science are falling-down to 25 percent in 2004, the latest available figures, from a high of 37 percent in 1984. And all this is occurring at a time when National Science Foundation (NSF) funding to encourage women in the computer sciences --...

The philosopher Alvin Gouldner entitled Chapter 13 of his classic study The Two Marxisms, "Nightmare Marxism," observing that every discourse contains within it alternatives that suborn its expressed intent -- its nightmare side. For Marxism, there were two nightmares: the first that Marx's theory was, despite its claim to scientific legitimacy, just another utopian project; the second that, despite his theoretical analysis, it would turn out that the bourgeoisie were right all along, and that private property was, indeed, the basis of civilization. Should these nightmares be right, Marxism would not be the path to an enlightened future, but to...

MOUNTAIN HOME, Ark. — When 9-year-old Kacie Sallee saw her father's face more clearly for the first time in her life, she had a question. "She said, 'Is that what he looks like?'" said her mother, Marinda Sallee. Kacie, who is blind, returned last week from China, where she received umbilical-cord stem cell treatment in hopes of improving her eyesight. The nearly four-week trip and medical treatment was paid through $60,000 in local donations. Kacie was born with septo-optic dysplasia, an underdevelopment of the optic nerve and pituitary gland. She could see bright colors out of her right eye but...

Bikinis and other sexy stimuli can make men more prone to seek immediate gratification — leading to blown diets, budgets and bank accounts, new research suggests.In the study, detailed in the Journal of Consumer Research, men alternately fondled t-shirts and bras (which were not being worn during the test).After touching the bras, men valued the future less and the present more, said lead researcher Bram Van Den Bergh of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Viewing ads with women in bikinis had the same effect.

June 12, 2008, 9:00 a.m. Science Without ExperimentsThere are no black-and-white answers when we face integrated complexity. By Jim Manzi The idea that that Republicans and conservatives are waging a “war on science� has become a staple of Democratic rhetoric. Hillary Clinton frequently referenced this in her campaign speeches. Chris Mooney, who wrote a book by this name, has an article on it in a recent issue of The New Republic. Daniel Engber has a three-part series on this topic in Slate. This idea has become widespread among liberals — and, unfortunately, many scientists. Mooney’s thesis is that it’s...

"This is a different kind of war." --Representative Harry Mitchell Student-Veterans Come Marching Home: A New GI Bill for Scientists Alan Kotok United States 6 June 2008 Since World War II, the U.S. government has offered education benefits to veterans through a series of "GI Bills" both as an incentive to encourage military enlistment and as a "gesture of gratitude" to young men and women who serve in the military. But, since the WWII era, these benefits have failed to keep up with the increasing cost of higher education. A new bill--it has passed both houses of Congress but...

The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology by Alister E. McGrath (Too new - there are no customer reviews as yet) Editorial Reviews Review "Alister McGrath's The Open Secret provides nothing less than the foundations of a vigorous renewal of natural theology for our time. Theologians and others who have considered natural theology an exhausted topic will have second thoughts after reading this richly nuanced, scholarly, creative, and enjoyable book." John F. Haught, Georgetown University "This is vintage McGrath: confident, capacious in scope, brisk in exposition, decisive in argument. Noone is better placed to make a case for...

June 10, 2008, 4:00 a.m. The Right FormulaConservatives and science. By Jim Manzi Conservatism has often had a hard time with science. One obvious reason is that many scientific findings can create technological changes, which in turn can upend traditional social arrangements. Conservatives value these arrangements, and so resist the findings. Through history, some of this resistance has been foolish (opposition to the smallpox inoculation in the 18th century), and some of it laudable (resistance to forced sterilization of anyone judged to be a “probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring� in the early 20th century). In such situations,...

A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang. The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old. Their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow.

Every nation could be described as a manifestation of a unique trait of character and most countries furthermore nurture, give emphasize to and celebrate this national identity of theirs. Some examples of such key national characters (please DO comment if you feel inclined to); USA: Liberty Italy: Creativity France: Refinement India: Spirituality Germany: Self-discipline Finland: "Sisu" (a Finnish term meaning "To have guts") Britain: Elevatedness Denmark: "Hygge" (a Danish word meaning "Good-naturedness", of mind as well as of deed) Spain: Passion China: Cultivation Russia: Chaos - just joking, I would actually say "Heart" (in the sense of having a big...

First paragraph (links omitted): A new study by a team of political scientists and sociologists at the journal Environmental Politics concludes that 9 out of 10 books published since 1972 that have disputed the seriousness of environmental problems and mainstream science can be linked to a conservative think tank (CTT). Following on earlier work by co-author Riley Dunlap and colleagues, the study examines the ability of conservative think tanks to use the media and other communication strategies to successfully challenge mainstream expert agreement on environmental problems.

Enlarge ImageFresh look.Recent surveys of the Milky Way show it contains a prominent central bar feature (bottom), distinguishing it from other galaxies of the classic spiral variety (top).Credit: (top) NASA/Spitzer Space telescope (bottom) NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech) The Milky Way Gets a Facelift By Phil BerardelliScienceNOW Daily News03 June 2008Forget what you thought the Milky Way looked like. The galaxy is far from the simple and elegant spiral-armed structure so often portrayed. New observations, presented today at the 212th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Missouri, reveal, among other things, that the Milky Way is missing two...

article physics is one of the most intriguing scientific fields, probing the nature of the very makeup of the universe itself. However, over the last half decade, due to the growing economic crisis and various items such as war funding taking precedence in government budgets, the budget to help the U.S. stay leaders in the field of particle physics has been slipping. The U.S. currently is down to only one remaining particle physics lab, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, associated with the University of Chicago and the lab was looking to be on the way out....

A conversation between The Root Editor-in-Chief Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nobel laureate and DNA pioneer James Watson about race and genetics, Jewish intelligence, blacks and basketball and Watson's African roots. --- HLG: Imagine if you were an African or an African-American intellectual. And it's 10 years from now. And you pick up The New York Times and some geneticist says, A) that intelligence is genetic, and B) the difference as measured on standardized tests between black people and white people, is traceable to a genetic basis. What would you, as a black intellectual, do, do you think? JW: I...

Long-term heavy use of marijuana may cause two important brain structures to shrink, Australian researchers said on Monday. Brain scans showed the hippocampus and amygdala were smaller in men who were heavy marijuana users compared to nonusers, the researchers said. The men had smoked at least five marijuana cigarettes daily for on average 20 years. The hippocampus regulates memory and emotion, while the amygdala plays a critical role in fear and aggression. The study, published in the American Medical Association's journal Archives of General Psychiatry, also found the heavy cannabis users earned lower scores than the nonusers in a verbal...

Web address:     http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/     080531090353.htm Invasion Strategy Of World's Largest Virus Revealed enlarge (A) TEM image of cryo-fixed sectioned and stained extracellular Mimivirus particles revealing a star-shaped structure at a unique vertex. (B) Cryo-TEM image of a whole vitrified fiber-less Mimivirus. (C) SEM image of the star-shaped structure in a mature extracellular Mimivirus particle. (D) Cryo-SEM of an immature, fiber-less particle. (E) Tomographic slice of a mature intracellular Mimivirus particle captured at a late (12 h post infection) infection stage. As shown in Video S1, at this late stage the host cell is packed with mature viral particles. (F and G) Volume...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A computer has been trained to "read" people's minds by looking at scans of their brains as they thought about specific words, researchers said on Thursday. They hope their study, published in the journal Science, might lead to better understanding of how and where the brain stores information. This might lead to better treatments for language disorders and learning disabilities, said Tom Mitchell of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who helped lead the study. "The question we are trying to get at is one people have been thinking about for centuries, which...

Globally Warm Schools by: Santiago Leon, May 28, 2008 As Global Warming becomes an issue in people’s lives, it has also become part of school’s curricula. I recently learned that my boss’s son had an assignment and quiz in his Spanish class on Global Warming. In many of the questions students had to translate sentences from Spanish to English but with a Global Warming theme. They even had to watch Al Gore’s movie, “Inconvenient Truth,” which has been a part of several school courses. Teaching Global Warming in schools is widespread across the nation, especially providing materials like Gore’s film,...

European particle physics laboratory CERN is set to launch its gigantic experiment which hopes to throw light on the origins of the universe within a month, the laboratory's head said Tuesday. If things go according to plan, the greatest experiment in the history of particle physics could unveil a sub-atomic component, the Higgs Boson, known as "the God Particle." The "Higgs," named after the eminent British physicist, Peter Higgs, who first proposed it in 1964, would fill a gaping hole in the benchmark theory for understanding the physical cosmos. Other work on the so-called Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could explain...

<p>Conveyor of a super-Einsteinian theory of gravitation that explains, among many other post-Einstein-effects, the Sun-Earth-Connection and the true cause of the global climate changes.</p> <p>As the glaciological and tree ring evidence shows, climate change is a natural phenomenon that has occurred many times in the past, both with the magnitude as well as with the time rate of temperature change that have occurred in the recent decades. The following facts prove that the recent global warming is not man-made but is a natural phenomenon.</p>

Dutch scientists claim they have completed the first sequencing of an individual woman's DNA. The researchers at Leiden University Medical Center say they have sequenced the entire genome of one their female researchers, though no other scientists have yet verified their data. The first sequencing of a composite human genome was announced in 2001. Four individual male genomes have so far been sequenced. Scientists have also mapped the DNA of about a dozen mammals, including chimpanzees, dogs, cats, cows and a platypus. The full complement of an organism's DNA is called its genome. In animals and people, it is made...

New red spot appears on Jupiter Feature may be an indicator of global climate change on the planet. In what's beginning to look like a case of planetary measles, a third red spot has appeared next to its cousins — the Great Red Spot and Red Spot, Jr. — in the turbulent jovian atmosphere. This spot, which is a fraction of the size of the two other features, lies to the west of the Great Red Spot in the same latitude band of clouds. The new spot was previously a white, oval-shaped storm. The change to a red color indicates...