Hugh Pickens writes "According to recent research, huge amounts of sulphur dioxide released by volcanic eruptions may have had more to do with wiping out dinosaurs than the meteorite strike at Chicxulub on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Marine sediments drilled from the Chicxulub crater have revealed that that the mass extinctions occurred 300,000 years after Chicxulub hit Earth. The Deccan volcanism was a long cumulative process that released vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. '"On land it must have been 7-8 degrees warmer," says Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller. "The Chicxulub impact alone could not have caused the mass extinction, because this impact predates the mass extinction."' Keller also postulates a second larger and still unidentified meteor strike after Chicxulub, that left the famous extraterrestrial layer of iridium found in rocks worldwide and pushed earth's ecosystem over the brink. But where's the crater? "I wish I knew," says Keller."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at the University of Houston (UH) have developed a new platinum-based catalyst for fuel cells that is at least four times more efficient and cheaper than existing catalysts. This discovery in fuel cell research may ease reliance on gasoline. According to the researchers, the active phase of the catalyst consists of nanoparticles with a platinum-rich shell and a core made of an alloy of copper, cobalt, and platinum. But it's not enough for this new catalyst to be more efficient and cheaper than a pure platinum one. It also needs to work for a long time — say, the life of a car. So far, the preliminary results look promising, but longer-term testing is needed before this kind of fuel cells can be used to power your car."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
MarkWhittington writes "Andrew Smith, the author of Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, recently published a polemic in the British newspaper The Guardian, entitled Plundering the Moon, that argued against the economic development of the Moon. Apparently the idea of mining Helium 3, an isotope found on the Moon but not on the Earth (at least in nature) disturbs Mr. Smith from an environmentalist standpoint. An examination of the issue makes one wonder why."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
aalobode writes "The Times of London has a current story based on the review of a book by Alex Boase, Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments. There they list the top science experiments — including the one from which the book gets its name — that were conducted by otherwise sane humans who tragically or otherwise ignored the effect of their research on the subjects themselves. Nowadays, most institutions have a review board for research on human subjects which would flag most proposals that could lead to harm for the subjects, but not so in the past. 'Another 1960s experiment, in which ten soldiers on a training flight were told by the pilot that the aircraft was disabled, and about to ditch in the ocean. They were then required to fill in insurance forms before the crash -- ostensibly so the Army was not financially liable for any deaths or injuries. They were actually unwitting participants in an experiment: the plane was not crippled at all. It revealed that fear of imminent death indeed causes soldiers to make more mistakes than usual when filling in forms.'"Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
Roland Piquepaille writes "You probably know that it is easy to combine hydrogen and oxygen to make water. After all, this chemical reaction is known for more than two centuries. But now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have discovered a new way to make water. As states the UIUC report, 'not only can they make water from unlikely starting materials, such as alcohols, their work could also lead to better catalysts and less expensive fuel cells.' But be warned: don't read the technical paper itself. It could win an obfuscated contest — if such a contest existed for scientific papers." Yet another advance in fuel cell technology; we discussed a different one just the other day.Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
starseeker writes "At long last, the STIX project has posted a Beta release of their scientific fonts. The mission of the STIX project has been the 'preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats.' The result is a font set containing thousands of characters, and hopefully a font set that will become a staple for scientific publishing. Among other uses, it has long been hoped that this would make the wide scale use of MathML in browsers possible. Despite rather long delays the project has persisted and is now showing concrete results."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
Al writes "A group from Newcastle University has released work that significantly improves the Draw-A-Secret method of creating passwords. The basic concept behind Draw-a-Secret is that humans excel at image recognition and memory, so 'passwords' should be designed to leverage that ability. The people behind the new work have refined the technique by parsing the shapes with a flexible grid and using existing images as a background to reinforce memory of the password. Imagine having your password be a graffiti-laden alteration of your favorite politicians campaign photo..."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica reports on a new study that suggests not only that certain areas of the mouse genome undergo more changes, but that changes to those areas are more tolerable by the organism than changes in other areas. Recently published in Nature Genetics, the study examined the certain copy number variations of the C57Bl/6 strain in mice that have been diverging for less than 1,000 generations. The results were a surprising number of variations. While the study does not address it, Ars Technica goes on to recount suggestions that genomes evolved to the point where they work well with evolution."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
BBCWatcher writes "As Slashdot reported previously, Congress is pushing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop energy efficiency measures for data centers, especially servers. But IBM is impatient: Computerworld notes IBM has signed up Neuwing Energy Ventures, a company trading in energy efficiency certificates, in a first for "green" computing. Now if your company consolidates, say, X86 servers onto an IBM mainframe on top of slashing about 85% off your electric bill each megawatt-hour saved earns one certificate. Then you can sell the certificates in emerging carbon trading markets. IBM's own consolidation project (collapsing 3,900 distributed servers onto 30 mainframes) will net certificates worth between $300K and $1M, depending on carbon's market price. Will ubiquitous carbon trading discourage energy-inefficient, distributed-style infrastructure in favor of highly virtualized and I/O-savvy environments, particularly mainframes?"Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
coondoggie writes to mention that room-sized computers and other recollections were shared over the weekend at the Vintage Computer Festival in Silicon Valley. "About 200 people, many of them of the gray-haired pony tail, bifocals and middle-age paunch variety, attended the event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
Himuanam writes "Former Intel CEO Grove rips on the medical research community, contrasting their lack of progress with the tech industry's juggernaut of breakthroughs over the past half-century or so. 'On Sunday afternoon, Grove is unleashing a scathing critique of the nation's biomedical establishment. In a speech at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, he challenges big pharma companies, many of which haven't had an important new compound approved in ages, and academic researchers who are content with getting NIH grants and publishing research papers with little regard to whether their work leads to something that can alleviate disease, to change their ways.'"Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Researchers at the University Of Alabama In Huntsville have discovered that some x-rays thought to come from intergalactic clouds of 'warm' gas are instead probably caused by lightweight electrons — leaving the mass of the universe as much as ten to 20 percent lighter (in terms of its ordinary matter) than previously calculated. In 2002 the same team reported finding large amounts of extra 'soft' (relatively low-energy) x-rays coming from the vast spaces in the middle of galaxy clusters. Their cumulative mass was thought to account for as much as ten percent of the mass and gravity needed to hold together galaxies, galaxy clusters, and perhaps the universe itself. When the team looked at data from a galaxy cluster in the southern sky, however, they found that energy from those additional soft x-rays doesn't look like it should. 'The best, most logical explanation seems to be that a large fraction of the energy comes from electrons smashing into photons instead of from warm atoms and ions, which would have recognizable spectral emission lines,' said Dr. Max Bonamente. The work was published Oct. 20 in the Astrophysical Journal."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes "With rapid-response surgery needed in Iraq and super-long-distance medicine a far-off necessity for a manned trip to Mars, NASA recently sent eight astronauts, roboticists and surgeons on its 'Vomit Comet,' pitting real doctors against new robotic ones. As if the prospect of a portable robo-OR deployingto Iraq by 2009 weren't enticing enough, one of the surgeons on board promised this in his flight blog: 'So far, surgery by hand is still the most efficient way to get the job done in a mobile, extreme environment. But robots are advancing rapidly... The solution that roboticists are working on now is to CAT scan a patient's entire body and beam the results back to Earth. Then a surgeon could program an operation and beam it back to upload into a robo-surgeon, which could carry out procedures like a player piano.'"Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have found that toddlers treat a small robot as a peer rather than a toy. A team from the University of California, San Diego, placed Sony's QRIO in a classroom of kids aged 18 months to 2 years and watched them interact. Over time the children grew to treat the robot as one of them — playing games with the robot, hugging it, and covering it up with a blanket when its batteries ran down."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
