News that make you go GRRR!

In the autumn of 1913, two farmers were arguing about hominid skull fragments they had uncovered while digging a drainage ditch. The location was Boskop, a small town about 200 miles inland from the east coast of South Africa.

These Afrikaner farmers, to their lasting credit, had the presence of mind to notice that there was something distinctly odd about the bones. They brought the find to Frederick W. Fitz­Simons, director of the Port Elizabeth Museum, in a small town at the tip of South Africa. The scientific community of South Africa was small, and before long the skull came to the attention of S. H. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.

The idea that giant-brained people were not so long ago walking the dusty plains of South Africa was sufficiently shocking to draw in the luminaries back in England. Two of the most prominent anatomists of the day, both experts in the reconstruction of skulls, weighed in with opinions generally supportive of Haughton’s conclusions.

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by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger December 28, 2009

SOURCE: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/the-brain-2/28-what-happened-to-hominids-who-were-smarter-than-us

Working in a cramped MIT laboratory in 1961, meteorologist Edward Lorenz stumbled upon a new science. Wanting a closer look at the data of a weather simulation he was running, Lorenz restarted it in the middle. Within a few minutes, everything changed and the data he had expected to see had morphed into strange new patterns. A stunned Lorenz checked his inputs. He had rounded the starting values by about .0001, which should have been insignificant. And yet it was not.

At the time, scientists thought small changes in starting values should make only a small difference in most systems. But sometimes such tiny shifts will cause a very different outcome, completely out of proportion with the size of the change—this hypersensitivity to initial conditions is what Lorenz dubbed the “butterfly effect” and what we now call chaos.

Chaos, which underlies systems as diverse as fractals, ferns, and weather, causes behavior so complex and unexpected that, though it is fundamental to the natural order, it was only recently that scientists began to characterize it. Chaotic movement is unstable and unpredictable, but completely deterministic, meaning that it’s controlled by its starting conditions.

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by Veronique Greenwood December 14, 2009

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_question_of_quantum_chaos/

The team, including Mark Reed, the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Engineering & Applied Science at Yale, showed that a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts could behave just like a silicon transistor.

The researchers were able to manipulate the molecule’s different energy states depending on the voltage they applied to it through the contacts. By manipulating the energy states, they were able to control the current passing through the molecule.

“It’s like rolling a ball up and over a hill, where the ball represents electrical current and the height of the hill represents the molecule’s different energy states,” Reed said. “We were able to adjust the height of the hill, allowing current to get through when it was low, and stopping the current when it was high.” In this way, the team was able to use the molecule in much the same way as regular transistors are used.

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December 23, 2009

SOURCE: http://www.physorg.com/news180785053.html

The job of a scientist has its fun parts, and its not-so-fun parts. Making new discoveries, understanding the way things work, and experimenting with the natural world are all pretty cool ways to spend your day. Sifting through endless files of data looking for small correlations and insight…not so much. Which may explain the popularity of the new software from Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab called Eureqa. Toted as something of a virtual scientist, Eureqa finds hidden mathematical relations in large spreadsheets of data. The software uses a technique, symbolic regression, that slowly evolves equations over time to see which best fits the information you give it. How powerful is Eureqa? Well it can derive Newton’s Second Law from the motion of a pendulum without any input on the physical laws of mechanics in just a few hours. So it has Newton beat by several years. Other researchers are hoping to have Eureqa find the mathematical relations in their own work which is much more complicated than simple Newtonian physics. If successful, Eureqa could not only speed up scientific research, it could change the roles humans take in science. Check out video tutorials for Eureqa after the break.

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December 17th, 2009 by Aaron Saenz

SOURCE: http://singularityhub.com/2009/12/17/eureqa-software-to-replace-scientists/#more-10079

Sprinkled throughout every galaxy are tightly packed balls of thousands or even millions of stars. And deep within the heart of just about all of these stellar clusters are strange populations of stars called blue stragglers, which appear much younger than their companions, even though they should all be the same age. Now astronomers think they have identified the secret of these stars, which, like Dorian Gray, refuse to grow old.

As low-mass stars approach the end of their life cycles–at around 10 billion years old–most evolve first into red giants and then into white dwarfs. As they pass through those stages, the stars grow dimmer and cooler. But blue stragglers seem to follow a different path. Despite their advanced age–perhaps as old as 13 billion years–they burn hot and bright, just like a young star. Astronomers have hypothesized that these stars may owe their youthful looks to leaching from their neighbors. They may suck hydrogen away from nearby stars in a process called “mass transfer,” or collide with them and absorb them whole.

In two papers appearing this week in Nature, astronomers report evidence for both processes. One team observed blue stragglers in NGC 188, a cluster located about 5000 light-years away in the northern constellation Cepheus. The other group studied Messier 30, about 26,000 light-years away in Capricorn.

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By Phil Berardelli
23 December 2009

SOURCE: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1223/2

Mozilla is all set to launch its brand new mobile web browser to the market, although when exactly remains a mystery.

Today V3.co.uk tracked down (well, phoned) head of mobile at Mozilla Jay Sullivan, to speak about the new Firefox for mobile web browser.

Sullivan told us the browser was currently in release candidate format and was going through the necessary testing for any bugs before it could be launched – and although he apologised for the vagueness of this he did say it seemed most likely it will be launched at some point next week. Next week…isn’t that Christmas? A present from Mozilla? How kind.

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SOURCE: http://labs.v3.co.uk/2009/12/mozilla-unveils.html

This morning’s Wall Street Journal claims that a subsidiary of Citigroup was hacked by a Russian cyber gang which stole “tens of millions” of dollars, and that the incident is being investigated by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA), along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The WSJ gives US “government officials” – presumably from one or more of the above agencies – as its sources for the story.

The story also quotes Joe Petro, managing director of Citigroup’s Security and Investigative Services, who said that, “We had no breach of the system and there were no losses, no customer losses, no bank losses…. Any allegation that the FBI is working a case at Citigroup involving tens of millions of losses is just not true.”

The WSJ also says that federal agencies will not comment about their story.

So, was Citi hacked or not?

Back in 2008 in another hacking incident, Citi also denied it was hacked, but the evidence strongly indicated that it knew about the problem all along.

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Robert Charette Tue, December 22, 200

SOURCE: http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/telecom/security/citigroup-denies-massive-russian-hack-attack

The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA’s Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.

“Using data from Voyager, we have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system,” explains lead author Merav Opher, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from George Mason University. “This magnetic field holds the interstellar cloud together and solves the long-standing puzzle of how it can exist at all.”

The discovery has implications for the future when the solar system will eventually bump into other, similar clouds in our arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

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December 26, 2009 by Dr. Tony Phillips

SOURCE: http://www.physorg.com/news181052057.html

LIKE AN ORWELLIAN SET OF EYES watching society’s every move, Google—the world’s predominant search engine—is quickly becoming a modern-day Big Brother. Robert Verkaik, law editor for The Independent, described their intent on May 24, 2007 as “setting out to create the most comprehensive database of personal information ever assembled, one with the ability to tell people how to run their lives.”

Similarly, Clint Boulton of GoogleWatch described the corporation on September 9. “Google conjures an image of science fiction films such as War of the Worlds. The servers are like alien ships covering all of humanity, though instead of harvesting food sources, they are harvesting our search data for better advertising opportunities.”

But their motives aren’t simply financial. Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing Our Culture, provided a glimpse into their larger agenda in a June 30 article for the Daily Telegraph. “Back in 2006, when asked where he wanted Google to be in five years time, company CEO Eric Schmidt confessed that he hoped his search engine would be so knowledgeable about all of us that it would know what we wanted to do tomorrow.”

If information is power, Michael Malone’s comments for ABC News on September 5, 2008 put this matter into perspective. “Google’s real business now is not providing a service to its users, but owning the world’s data.” The Independent’s Robert Verkaik is even more blunt in his assessment. “Google wants to know everything —all the knowledge contained on the World Wide Web, and everything about you as a computer user, too.”

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By Victor Thorn

SOURCE: http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/primary_gatekeeper_202.html

SOURCE: http://blog.cytalk.com/2009/12/cell-phone-to-carry-cancer-warning-like-cigarettes/

After France cell phone cancer warning, A Maine legislator wants to make the state the first to require cell phones to carry warnings that they can cause brain cancer, although there is no consensus among scientists that they do and industry leaders dispute the claim.

The now-ubiquitous devices carry such warnings in some countries, though no U.S. states require them, according to the National Conference of State Legislators. A similar effort is afoot in San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsom wants his city to be the nation’s first to require the warnings.

Maine Rep. Andrea Boland, D-Sanford, said numerous studies point to the cancer risk, and she has persuaded legislative leaders to allow her proposal to come up for discussion during the 2010 session that begins in January, a session usually reserved for emergency and governors’ bills.

Boland herself uses a cell phone, but with a speaker to keep the phone away from her head. She also leaves the phone off unless she’s expecting a call. At issue is radiation emitted by all cell phones.

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