Mastodon, Mammoth Remains Turn Up in Ill.

"A few months after the last of the elephants left Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo in May, amid complaints from activists that Illinois doesn't have a climate fit for such animals, remains of their ancient relatives were showing up around the state.... He said the recent spate of findings may be due to this summer's drought, which shrank the wetlands where mastodon remains are usually found. It also may reflect the spread of construction projects into Chicago's outer suburbs. "But whatever the reason, there's no doubting that we have a rich record of large Pleistocene fauna here in Illinois," Saunders said, referring to the giant mammals of the last Ice Age. "There are about 80 localities of record here for American mastodons, and about 60 for mammoths. And I'd suspect that probably only one out of every 10 finds is reported. I'd love to know how many remains are being used as doorstops or are sitting in private curiosity cabinets.""

More machines than people on the Internet

Rise of the robots THE UNITED NATIONS is warning that machines are starting to take over from humans as the biggest users of the world wide wibbly web. The UN's telecommunications agency International Telecommunication Union (ITU)has just penned a report called 'Internet of Things' in which it predicts the next stage in the technological revolution where humans, electronic devices, inanimate objects and databases are linked by a radically transformed Internet. It says that already there are signs that we are heading into a new era where the robotic 'users' of the Internet will be counted in billions and where humans may become the minority as generators and receivers of traffic,' it added."

Prehistoric Lizard Called Historic Link

DALLAS - Amateur fossil hunter Van Turner felt certain he had found something important during his search of earth turned up by bulldozers making way for a new subdivision in Dallas County. Sixteen years later, scientists finally confirmed that Turner had discovered the first well preserved early mosasaur found in North America — a prehistoric lizard that lived 92 million years ago that evolved into what some call the "T. Rex of the ocean."

Harriet the tortoise turns 175

ANBERRA (Reuters) - One of the world's oldest living animals, Harriet the tortoise, celebrated her 175th birthday on Tuesday -- with a pink hibiscus flower cake at her retirement home in northern Australia. Australia Zoo, where Harriet has spent the past 17 years, says the Giant Galapagos Land Tortoise was collected by scientist Charles Darwin in 1835, although some historians have disputed this.

Vaccine against tooth decay successful in animal tests: researchers

Portuguese scientists said they had developed an experimental vaccine against tooth decay which was successful in laboratory tests on rats and could pave the way for a version that works for humans. "What we found is that the animals which were vaccinated with this protein developed much smaller lesions than the control group which had not been vaccinated," said Paula Ferreira, one of three Oporto University researchers who worked on the vaccine.

Former X Prize Rivals Announce Partnership

Two former rocketeer rivals are teaming up to develop privately-built spacecraft, officials with both groups said Friday. Canada's London, Ontario-based firm PlanetSpace and the Romanian aerospace company ARCA - both past competitors in the $10 million Ansari X Prize contest for suborbital spaceflight - are pooling their expertise or a joint space project. While some details of the partnership remain under wraps, the collaboration will likely include the sharing of technology and other resources, PlanetSpace officials said.

Science to ride gravitational waves

BBC NEWS: "Many expect it to be one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of our age: 'There'll certainly be a Nobel Prize in it for somebody,' says Jim Hough. The UK professor is standing on a farm road in Lower Saxony, Germany, with a crop of beet on one side and sprouts on the other. But the real interest lies at his feet - with some shabby, corrugated metal sheeting. For a moment, it looks like an upturned pig trough until you realise it stretches for hundreds of metres. The sheeting hides a trench and, within it, the vacuumed tube of an experiment Hough believes will finally detect the most elusive of astrophysical phenomena - gravitational waves. The Glasgow University scientist has been chasing these 'ripples' in space-time for more than 30 years and feels certain he is now just a matter of months away from bagging his quarry."

'Innovative' Math, but Can You Count?

New York Times: "LAST spring, when he was only a sophomore, Jim Munch received a plaque honoring him as top scorer on the high school math team here. He went on to earn the highest mark possible, a 5, on an Advanced Placement exam in calculus. His ambition is to become a theoretical mathematician. So Jim might have seemed the veritable symbol for the new math curriculum installed over the last seven years in this ambitious, educated suburb of Rochester. Since seventh grade, he had been taking the 'constructivist' or 'inquiry' program, so named because it emphasizes pupils' constructing their own knowledge through a process of reasoning.Jim, however, placed the credit elsewhere. His parents, an engineer and an educator, covertly tutored him in traditional math. Several teachers, in the privacy of their own classrooms, contravened the official curriculum to teach the problem-solving formulas that constructivist math denigrates as mindless memorization. 'My whole experience in math the last few years has been a struggle against the program,' Jim said recently. 'Whatever I've achieved, I've achieved in spite of it. Kids do not do better learning math themselves. There's a reason we go to school, which is that there's someone smarter than us with something to teach us.'Such experiences and emotions have burst into public discussion and no small amount of rancor in the last eight months in Penfield. This community of 35,000 has become one of the most obvious fronts in the nationwide math wars, which have flared from California to Pittsburgh to the former District 2 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, pitting progressives against traditionalists, with nothing less than America's educational and economic competitiveness at stake.In these places and others, groups of parents have condemned constructivist math for playing down such basic computational tools as borrowing, carrying, place value, algorithms, multiplication tables and long division, while often introducing calculators into the classroom as early as first or second grade. Such criticism has run headlong into the celebration of constructivism by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and such leading teacher-training institutions as the Bank Street College of Education."

Vatican: Faithful Should Listen to Science

Vatican cardinal said Thursday the faithful should listen to what secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks turning into 'fundamentalism' if it ignores scientific reason. Cardinal Paul Poupard, who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture, made the comments at a news conference on a Vatican project to help end the 'mutual prejudice' between religion and science that has long bedeviled the Roman Catholic Church and is part of the evolution debate in the United States. The Vatican project was inspired by Pope John Paul II's 1992 declaration that the church's 17th-century denunciation of Galileo was an error resulting from 'tragic mutual incomprehension.' Galileo was condemned for supporting Nicolaus Copernicus' discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun; church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe. 'The permanent lesson that the Galileo case represents pushes us to keep alive the dialogue between the various disciplines, and in particular between theology and the natural sciences, if we want to prevent similar episodes from repeating themselves in the future,' Poupard said. But he said science, too, should listen to religion. 'We know where scientific reason can end up by itself: the atomic bomb and the possibility of cloning human beings are fruit of a reason that wants to free itself from every ethical or religious link,' he said. 'But we also know the dangers of a religion that severs its links with reason and becomes prey to fundamentalism,' he said."

Two new moons found around Pluto

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted two possible new moons around Pluto, the ninth planet in the Solar System. If confirmed, it would bring Pluto's tally of satellites to three; Charon, the only known moon of Pluto, was discovered by astronomers in 1978. Confirmation of two new moons would shed light on the evolution of the Kuiper Belt, the vast region containing icy objects beyond Neptune's orbit. All the candidate moon seem to orbit Pluto in an anti-clockwise direction.