Gates computes by himself

New York Daily News: "Maybe diet Orange Crush is the true breakfast of champions. Microsoft giant Bill Gates recently wrapped up another of his 'think week' sessions - seven days of seclusion spent pondering the future of his computer empire while guzzling his favorite orange soda. The twice-yearly getaways in a secret Northwest locale have become legendary in technology circles. The sessions have yielded some of Microsoft's most innovative ideas, including its Internet browser, the tablet computer and its online video games. Gates has been stealing away on these private brainstorming sessions since the 1980s. It's a time of serious solitude. No family. No employees. No interruptions, save for a caretaker who slips him two meals a day. One lunch for the world's richest man consisted of grilled cheese and clam chowder, The Wall Street Journal reported. Gates, 49, spends this time poring through dozens of papers penned by employees pitching their ideas - everything from suggestions for beefing up software security to leads on new technology trends. 'It's the world's coolest suggestion box,' Microsoft MapPoint general manager Stephen Lawler told The Journal."

The Center for the Obvious releases a new report

Study highlights global decline By Jonathan Amos BBC News science reporter The most comprehensive survey ever into the state of the planet concludes that human activities threaten the Earth's ability to sustain future generations. The report says the way society obtains its resources has caused irreversible changes that are degrading the natural processes that support life on Earth. This will compromise efforts to address hunger, poverty and improve healthcare. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was drawn up by 1,300 researchers from 95 nations over a period of four years.

What's Going On?

NY Times > : "What's Going On? By PAUL KRUGMAN Democratic societies have a hard time dealing with extremists in their midst. The desire to show respect for other people's beliefs all too easily turns into denial: nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself. We can see this failing clearly in other countries. In the Netherlands, for example, a culture of tolerance led the nation to ignore the growing influence of Islamic extremists until they turned murderous. But it's also true of the United States, where dangerous extremists belong to the majority religion and the majority ethnic group, and wield great political influence. Before he saw the polls, Tom DeLay declared that 'one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America.' Now he and his party, shocked by the public's negative reaction to their meddling, want to move on. But we shouldn't let them. The Schiavo case is, indeed, a chance to highlight what's going on in America. One thing that's going on is a climate of fear for those who try to enforce laws that religious extremists oppose. Randall Terry, a spokesman for Terri Schiavo's parents, hasn't killed anyone, but one of his former close associates in the anti-abortion movement is serving time for murdering a doctor. George Greer, the judge in the Schiavo case, needs armed bodyguards. Another thing that's going on is the rise of politicians willing to violate the spirit of the law, if not yet the letter, to cater to the religious right. Everyone knows about the attempt to circumvent the courts through 'Terri's law.' But there has been little national exposure for a Miami Herald report that Jeb Bush sent state law enforcement agents to seize Terri Schiavo from the hospice - a plan called off when local police said they would enforce the judge's order that she remain there. And the future seems all too likely to bring more intimidation in the name of God and more political intervention that undermines the rule of law. The religious right is already having a big impact on education: 31 percent of teachers surveyed by the National Science Teachers Association feel pressured to present creationism-related material in the classroom. But medical care is the cutting edge of extremism. Yesterday The Washington Post reported on the growing number of pharmacists who, on religious grounds, refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control or morning-after pills. These pharmacists talk of personal belief; but the effect is to undermine laws that make these drugs available. And let me make a prediction: soon, wherever the religious right is strong, many pharmacists will be pressured into denying women legal drugs. And it won't stop there. There is a nationwide trend toward 'conscience' or 'refusal' legislation. Laws in Illinois and Mississippi already allow doctors and other health providers to deny virtually any procedure to any patient. Again, think of how such laws expose doctors to pressure and intimidation. But the big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster, so that the courts can be packed with judges less committed to upholding the law than Mr. Greer. We can't count on restraint from people like Mr. DeLay, who believes that he's on a mission to bring a 'biblical worldview' to American politics, and that God brought him a brain-damaged patient to help him with that mission. What we need - and we aren't seeing - is a firm stand by moderates against religious extremism. Some people ask, with justification, Where are the Democrats? But an even better question is, Where are the doctors fiercely defending their professional integrity? I think the American Medical Association disapproves of politicians who second-guess medical diagnoses based on video images - but the association's statement on the Schiavo case is so timid that it's hard to be sure. The closest parallel I can think of to current American politics is Israel. There was a time, not that long ago, when moderate Israelis downplayed the rise of religious extremists. But no more: extremists have already killed one prime minister, and everyone realizes that Ariel Sharon is at risk. America isn't yet a place where liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren't sufficiently hard-line, fear assassination. But unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here."

Censorship in the Science Museums

NY Times: "Big-screen Imax theaters typically offer lavish visual spectacles with bland and uplifting scripts. Their films are seldom the stuff of controversy. So it was a bit of a shock to learn, from an article by Cornelia Dean in The Times on March 19, that a dozen or so Imax theaters, mostly in the South, have been shying away from science documentaries that might offend Christian fundamentalists. Worse yet, some of those theaters are located in science centers or museums, the supposed expositors of scientific truth for public education."

A Point of View

BBC NEWS: "In his weekly opinion column, Brian Walden considers the gap between science and religion - and what this might mean for the future of humankind. Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, wrote something recently that chilled me to the bone. Sir Martin is the winner of the Michael Faraday Prize awarded annually by the Royal Society for excellence in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. In my case he did almost too good a job. He pointed out that though the idea of evolution is well-known, the vast potential for further evolution isn't yet part of our common culture. He then gave an example. He said: 'It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; it will be entities as different from us as we are from bacteria.'"

Press Release: NASA's Spitzer Marks Beginning of New Age of Planetary Science

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has for the first time captured the light from two known planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. The findings mark the beginning of a new age of planetary science, in which "extrasolar" planets can be directly measured and compared. "Spitzer has provided us with a powerful new tool for learning about the temperatures, atmospheres and orbits of planets hundreds of light-years from Earth," said Dr. Drake Deming of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., lead author of a new study on one of the planets.

Like Something Out of a Cartoon...

Reuters.com: "LONDON (Reuters) - Can't get out of bed in the morning? Scientists at MIT's Media Lab in the United States have invented an alarm clock called Clocky to make even the doziest sleepers, who repeatedly hit the snooze button, leap out of bed. After the snooze button is pressed, the clock, which is equipped with a set of wheels, rolls off the table to another part of the room. 'When the alarm sounds again, simply finding Clocky ought to be strenuous enough to prevent even the doziest owner from going back to sleep,' New Scientist magazine said Tuesday."

Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed Gene

NY Times: "In a startling discovery, geneticists at Purdue University say they have found plants that possess a corrected version of a defective gene inherited from both their parents, as if some handy backup copy with the right version had been made in the grandparents' generation or earlier. The finding implies that some organisms may contain a cryptic backup copy of their genome that bypasses the usual mechanisms of heredity. If confirmed, it would represent an unprecedented exception to the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century. Equally surprising, the cryptic genome appears not to be made of DNA, the standard hereditary material."

Hospital superbug kills baby

SocietyGuardian.co.uk: "A one-day-old baby boy was killed by the hospital superbug MRSA, it emerged today. Luke Day was just 36 hours old when he died in Ipswich hospital, in a case which has left medical bosses unable to explain what went wrong. The baby was born naturally on February 2, weighing 7lb 7oz, and showed no signs of ill health. But just 36 hours later he was dead and a post mortem examination, carried out at Great Ormond Street Children's hospital in London, found the cause of death was septicaemia caused by MRSA (methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus). Hospital bosses said they had no idea how the superbug had infected Luke during his time in the hospital's maternity unit after an investigation failed to uncover the source of the infection."

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Same face builds trust, not lust

BBC NEWS: "Similar facial features make people trust - but not fancy- each other, research has suggested. Of 144 students, the majority picked individuals who most looked like them to be the most trustworthy, said psychologists at Aberdeen University." There was a funny SNL skit about this last Saturday, too bad I can't link to that, too.

Darwin Flotilla- One Proposal to Detect ET

Darwin observes in the infrared since life on Earth leaves its mark at these wavelengths. On Earth, biological activity produces gases that mingle with our atmosphere. For example, plants give out oxygen and animals expel carbon dioxide and methane. These gases, and other substances, such as water, leave their fingerprints by absorbing certain wavelengths of infrared light. Darwin will split the light from an extrasolar planet into its constituent wavelengths, using an instrument called a spectrometer. This will show the drop in light caused by specific gases being in the atmosphere, allowing them to be identified. If they are the same as those produced by life on Earth, rather than by non-biological processes, Darwin will have found evidence for life on another world.

Hogzilla

ALAPAHA, Georgia (AP) -- A team of National Geographic experts has confirmed south Georgia's monster hog, known to locals as Hogzilla, was indeed real -- and really, really big. They also noted the super swine didn't quite live up to the 1,000-pound (450-kilogram), 12-foot (3.6-meter) hype generated when Hogzilla was caught on a farm last summer and photographed hanging from a backhoe. Donning biohazard suits to exhume the behemoth's smelly remains, the experts estimated Hogzilla was probably only 7 1/2 to 8 feet (2.25 to 2.4 meters) long, and weighed about 800 pounds (360 kilograms). The confirmation came in a documentary aired Sunday night on the National Geographic Channel; it will be rebroadcast Wednesday and Saturday. --why did he kill it-- ?

X-celling Over Men

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: X-celling Over Men: "Men are always telling me not to generalize about them. But a startling new study shows that science is backing me up here. Research published last week in the journal Nature reveals that women are genetically more complex than scientists ever imagined, while men remain the simple creatures they appear. 'Alas,' said one of the authors of the study, the Duke University genome expert Huntington Willard, 'genetically speaking, if you've met one man, you've met them all. We are, I hate to say it, predictable. You can't say that about women. Men and women are farther apart than we ever knew. It's not Mars or Venus. It's Mars or Venus, Pluto, Jupiter and who knows what other planets.' Women are not only more different from men than we knew. Women are more different from each other than we knew - creatures of 'infinite variety,' as Shakespeare wrote."

Lab fireball 'may be black hole'

BBC NEWS: "A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said. It was generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, US, which smashes beams of gold nuclei together at near light speeds. Horatiu Nastase says his calculations show that the core of the fireball has a striking similarity to a black hole."

Row over climate 'hockey stick'

"A row has erupted over one of the most provocative symbols of global warming - the iconic "hockey stick" graph. This record of Northern Hemisphere temperature variation in the last 1,000 years shows a recent warming trend apparently linked to human activities. New work in the journal Geophysical Research Letters questions its validity, challenging the way it was originally put together. Other scientists say the work simply highlights a technical issue." Has anyone read State of Fear by Michael Crichton? (I know Mojo has) It talks about bias in scientific results and the importance of staying objective when looking at data like this. It's a really good book, even though some people have been attacking it because they claim it is denying global warming, but really it is just saying that we have far too little data to make some of the conclusions that we are, and if we really want to solve the problem we have to figure out how it is actually happening first.

When Trouble Hits Those Holes in Your Head

NY Times: "You've had a cold for five to seven days and thought you were getting better. Then it grew worse. More congestion, increasing fatigue and now headache or facial pain around your nose or eyes or upper teeth. You guessed it was a sinus infection. Depending on the severity of the symptoms, the doctor's examination and inclinations about treatment, you may be prescribed an antibiotic. But is this what you need to get better? Chances are, it is not. Most cases of acute sinusitis are caused by viruses, not bacteria, and taking an antibiotic does nothing more than enrich the pharmaceutical companies and increase the chances of being infected with drug-resistant bacteria. The average adult catches two or three colds a year, and 0.5 to 2 percent of them are complicated by bacterial infections. In other words, if antibiotics are prescribed for most sinusitis cases, they are most likely being way overprescribed. In the course of a year, an estimated 37 million Americans experience sinusitis, the fifth most common diagnosis for which antibiotics are prescribed in outpatient settings. But how is the doctor to know whether an antibiotic is what is needed? Unless a sample of the pus in the nasal cavities is examined under a microscope - a rare act in most physicians' offices - there is no certain way to tell."

Europe tells US: 'Come to Europa'

BBC NEWS: "The next big cooperative European-US space mission will be to Europa, the ice-crusted moon of Jupiter. A joint working team is being set up to consider what sort of spacecraft would be needed and what each side could do."

Fly me to the moon...

Bush Names Academic Griffin to Head NASA Fri Mar 11, 2005 03:33 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush said on Friday he intends to nominate Michael Griffin of Johns Hopkins University to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Stars on Diet: Weight Is Limited to 150 Suns, Researchers Find

NY Times: "SHINGTON, March 9 - The universe is full of stars, but there appear to be few really fat ones. Astronomers said Wednesday that there seemed to be a stellar weight limit equivalent to 150 Suns, but no bigger. Using the Hubble Space Telescope to examine one of the densest clusters of stars in the Milky Way, which should have been brimming with fat stars, astronomers said they found a sharp cutoff in the mass of bodies that form in this stellar nursery. In examining hundreds of stars in the dense Arches cluster, Dr. Donald F. Figer and colleagues at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore said they could not find any larger than 130 solar masses, or equal to the mass of 130 of our Suns. 'We are surprised at this result because we expected to find stars up to 500 to 1,000 times more massive than our Sun,' Dr. Figer said."

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things: "The Fembots are here Guests of Japan's World Expo opening on March 25 will be greeted by multilingual, rapping robots. The Actroid, shown here, was developed by Kokoro and Advanced Media. She's a twentysomething fembot with dewy skin, warm eyes, and enough AI to understand 40,000 phrases in each of four languages: Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean. She also 'performs rap music.' Snip: The humanoid can put on facial expressions suitable for the more than 2,000 types of answers it can give, but it may refuse to answer to some questions for 'privacy reasons,' making an X with her arms and bowing. She also has a sense of irony. When asked if she is a robot, she says, 'Y.e.s, I. a.m. a. r.o.b.o.t' in a disconnected voice and moves about clumsily. A moment later, she says 'Just kidding' and starts a natural flow of movements. "

Hello There..... Mister.... Anderson

Inventing the Future, Truly Intelligent Agents Future user interfaces will be based on AGENTS (ahhh) rather than on tools Agents are software programs designed to be managed rather than manipulated An intelligent software agent can: Ask questions as well as respond to commands Pay attention to its user’s work patterns Serve as a guide and a coach Take on its owner’s goals (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) Use reasoning to fabricate goals of its own I found this in my computer science book, thought it was pre-apocalyptic : thus fitting for the Thief.

Think of a Number ... Come On, Think!

NY Times: "HEY, cellphone user, when was the last time you memorized a phone number? If you're like some of the 176 million mobile-phone subscribers nationwide, it may have been before you got your cellphone, because - perhaps unintentionally - you've become reliant on the gadget as both a communication device and a phone book." Yea, I know I posted something really similar to this a couple weeks ago, but this has some other cool information about human memory and how it works and what information we're remembering.

The bicycle cellphone recharger kit

Engadget: "We usually prefer to just have one of the interns follow us around with one of those hand crank chargers, but Akihabara News has stumbled upon another way to give your cellphone a little extra juice that probably won’t violate any labor laws: a charger kit that connects to a bicycle so you can recharge your phone as you ride around town."

Football coach admits to licking player's blood

I know this isn't really news.... but you must read it... and just when you thought sports couldn't get any more bizarre.

Football coach admits to licking player's blood

I know this isn't really news.... but you must read it... and just when you thought sports couldn't get any more bizarre.

Milk doesn't make a body good.

Milk isn't what makes bones strong - (United Press International): "Milk isn't what makes bones strong WASHINGTON, DC, Mar. 8 (UPI) -- Milk and dairy products do not promote healthy bones in kids and young adults, a Washington-based research group found after analyzing 58 studies." Sorry mothers out there. Check your research next time.

Wanna See Saturn With Your Own Eyes -- Me TOO!!

Experiencing Saturn through a telescope for the first time is a feast for the eyes. NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn is helping people savor the view by coordinating a network of people and telescopes around the globe to help others see the ringed giant. The Cassini Saturn Observation Campaign includes more than 380 volunteers located in 44 U.S. states and 50 countries. During the past year, Saturn Observation Campaign members held nearly 800 events for more than 108,000 people from all ages and walks of life, including students, teachers and curious members of the public. The best viewing this year will last through April 2005. In May, Saturn will dip lower in the sky, and by late June it will be lost in the glare of the setting Sun. The rings are now open wide, and even though the tilt of the rings has been decreasing since 2003, this year still offers a splendid view. With a small telescope you can see many features like the rings, the big gap between the rings and maybe even some storms or spots on the planet. "People are speechless when they first see Saturn with their own eyes. Everyone says 'wow,' and this means I hear 'wow' in many languages here in Pasadena," said Jones. Some people can't believe they are seeing the real thing, and accuse me of placing a tiny picture in the telescope. Some people actually cry with joy. I can connect with their emotions because Saturn was the first object I looked at through my very first home-made telescope many years ago."

World's oldest biped skeleton unearthed

New Scientist Breaking News - World's oldest biped skeleton unearthed: "World's oldest biped skeleton unearthed Oldest known humans just got older 16 February 2005 The fossilised skeleton of a four million-year-old human ancestor able to walk on two legs could provide clues as to how humans' upright walk evolved. The remains, found in north-east Ethiopia, are the oldest yet discovered of an upright hominid, scientists told a press conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Saturday."

If you build it... when will that be?

Generations of physicists have shared that joke. Yet they keep striving to harness the sun's fury. Fusion promises cheap, abundant power with no emissions of carbon dioxide, or CO2, and fewer radioactive wastes than nuclear energy plants leave. Scientists hope to inch closer to the dream via the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.

The Concorde First Flew 36 Years Ago

Originally uploaded by ReidAnderes. 1969: Concorde flies for the first time The supersonic airliner, Concorde, has made a "faultless" maiden flight. The Anglo-French plane took off from Toulouse and was in the air for just 27 minutes before the pilot made the decision to land. So, why today... do we still not have supersonic flight on a regular affordable basis??

Frozen Sea near Mar's Equator

Originally uploaded by ReidAnderes. A new image, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, shows what appears to be a dust-covered frozen sea near the Martian equator. It shows a flat plain, part of the Elysium Planitia, that is covered with irregular blocky shapes. They look just like the rafts of fragmented sea ice that lie off the coast of Antarctica on Earth. The scene is a few tens of kilometres across, centred on latitude 5º North and longitude 150º East.

Rice a Building Block in China

BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- Rice fills the bowls on many Chinese tables -- and also the cracks in its ancient buildings, and maybe even the Great Wall, Xinhua news agency reported. "The legend that ancient Chinese craftsmen used glutinous rice porridge in the mortar while building ramparts has been verified," it said in a report seen on Monday.