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434 articles from WEDNESDAY 1.9.2010
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WEDNESDAY 1. SEPTEMBER, 2010
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20:56
Island Evacuations Start as Earl Nears East Coast
Powerful Hurricane Earl wheeled toward the East Coast, driving the first tourists Wednesday from North Carolina vacation islands and threatening damaging winds and waves up the Atlantic seaboard over Labor Day weekend.Visitors were taking ferries off Ocracoke Island and told to leave neighboring Cape Hatteras in North Carolina's Outer Banks, and federal authorities have warned people all along the Eastern seaboard to be prepared to evacuate.
Virginia's Gov. Bob McDonnell declared a state of emergency as a precaution, allowing the state to position staff and resources ahead of the storm. Emergency officials as far north as Maine urged people to have disaster plans and supplies ready.
Earl was still more than 700 miles south-southeast of Cape Hatteras, with top sustained winds of 125 mph. It was on track to near the North Carolina shore late Thursday or early Friday and then blow north along the coast, with forecasters cautioning that it was still too early to tell how close the storm may come to land.
The National Weather Service issued a hurricane warning for much of the North Carolina coast and hurricane watches from Virginia to Delaware.
Not since Hurricane Bob in 1991 has such a powerful storm had such a large swath of the East Coast in its sights, said Dennis Feltgen, spokesman for the National Hurricane Center.
"A slight shift of that track to the west is going to impact a great deal of real estate with potential hurricane-force winds," Feltgen said.
Even if Earl stays well offshore, it will kick up rough surf and dangerous rip currents up and down the coast through the Labor Day weekend, a prime time for beach vacations, forecasters said.
The only evacuation orders so far affected parts of the Outer Banks, thin strips of beach and land that face the open Atlantic.
Tourist cars, some with campers in tow,...
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20:56Archaeologists in Jordan have unearthed a 3,000-year-old Iron Age temple with a trove of figurines of ancient deities and circular clay vessels used for religious rituals, officials said Wednesday.
The head of the Jordanian Antiquities Department, Ziad al-Saad, said the sanctuary dates to the eighth century B.C. and was discovered at Khirbat 'Ataroz near the town of Mabada, some 20 miles (32 kilometers) southwest of the capital Amman.
He said the complex boasts a main room that measures 388 square feet (36 square meters), as well as two antechambers and an open courtyard.
The sanctuary and its artifacts -- hewn from limestone and basalt or molded from clay and bronze -- show the complex religious rituals of Jordan's ancient biblical Moabite kingdom, according to al-Saad.
"Today we have the material evidence, the archaeological proof of the level of advancement of technology and civilization at that period of time," he said.
The Moabites, whose kingdom ran along present-day Jordan's mountainous eastern shore of the Dead Sea, were closely related to the Israelites, although the two were in frequent conflict. The Babylonians eventually conquered the Moabites in 582 B.C.
Archaeologists also unearthed some 300 pots, figurines of deities and sacred vessels used for worship at the site. Al-Saad said it was rare to discover so many Iron Age items in one place.
Excavations began in Khirbat 'Ataroz in 2000 in cooperation with the California-based La Sierra University, but the majority of the items were only discovered in the past few months.
Among the items on display Wednesday, there was a four-legged animal god Hadad, as well as delicate circular clay vessels used in holy rites. Al-Saad said the objects indicate the Moabites worshipped many deities and had a highly organized ritual use of temples.
The items will be scientifically analyzed and conserved before going on display in Jordan's archaeological museum.
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20:56Surgery to remove healthy ovaries gives a triple benefit to high-risk women: It lowers their threat of breast and ovarian cancer, and boosts their chances of living longer, new research suggests.
The study is the largest to date to find advantages for preventive surgery for women who carry BRCA gene mutations. Women with the faulty genes have a dramatically higher cancer risk than other women -- five times greater for breast cancer and at least 10 times greater for ovarian cancer.
The study, appearing in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association, found benefits for women with two different BRCA gene variants whether they had previously had breast cancer or not.
The results offer more tailored evidence for women considering ovary removal, a surgery that ends fertility, fast-forwards them into early menopause and may contribute to osteoporosis or heart problems later in life.
"It's really critical to have the best information when making such a profound decision," said senior author Timothy Rebbeck of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
The researchers followed nearly 2,500 women with BRCA mutations in Austria, England, the Netherlands and the United States. All the women were cancer-free at the start. They were watched for an average of four years. Most of the women were younger than 50 at the start of the study.
They got counseling to help them choose between surgery or increased screening to watch for cancers early.
Ten percent of the women chose mastectomy and 40 percent chose to have their ovaries removed; some had both. More than half the women had neither surgery.
The women who chose ovary removal had impressive results:
-1 percent were later diagnosed with ovarian cancer that showed up in cells missed by surgeons, compared to 6 percent of the women who kept their ovaries.
-11 percent were diagnosed with breast cancer, compared to 19 percent...
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20:56NASA and aerospace company ATK Aerospace Systems successfully completed the second test of a next-generation solid rocket motor Tuesday, but the rocket it was designed to send into space faces an uncertain future.
The rocket motor sent a plume of fire into the Utah desert in the two-minute test of the largest and most powerful solid rocket motor designed for flight.
The rocket motor is a more powerful version of the one used to send the space shuttle into orbit and was designed as part of the Constellation program to send astronauts back to the moon aboard the Orion spacecraft.
It was the second test on the rocket and was designed to make sure it can work at different temperatures with the motor cooled to about 4 degrees Celsius.
President Barack Obama plans to cancel much of that program in favor of boosting commercial spaceflight to near-Earth destinations and more long-distance exploration for NASA.
Though the rocket was designed with the moon in mind, NASA stressed Tuesday that it could instead be repurposed for a more long-range spacecraft if needed.
With some members of Congress attempting to salvage some parts of the Constellation program, it remains unclear what will happen to the existing rocket. Work on the Constellation program will continue until the budget process for next year is complete, officials said.
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20:55After two decades of planning and construction, the world's largest neutrino observatory, beneath arctic ice, will open in December, scientists say.
Dubbed IceCube, it holds 5,160 optical sensors in a cube whose sides measure more than 1,000 yards, making it an order of magnitude larger than other neutrino detectors, an American Institute of Physics release said Tuesday.
The Superkamiokande detector in the Japanese Alps, for example, is only 44 yards on a side.
The goal of the world's neutrino observatories is simple: find the source of cosmic rays.
"Almost a century after their discovery, we do not know from where the most energetic particles to hit the Earth originate and how they acquire their incredible energies," Francis Halzen, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, says.
High-energy neutrinos are formed in the universe's most violent events, like exploding stars and Gamma ray bursts.
With no electric charge and essentially no mass, trillions of neutrinos pass through the Earth and everything on it without effect.
On extremely rare occasions, a neutrino will strike the nucleus of an atom, creating a particle, called a muon, and a blue light that can be detected with optical sensors.
The trick is spying those rare collisions of high-energy neutrinos.
IceCube hopes to do it by sheer virtue of its size.
"IceCube has been totally optimized for size in order to be sensitive to the very small neutrino fluxes that may reveal the sources of cosmic rays and the particle nature of dark matter," Halzen says.
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20:23
A model system for group behavior of nanomachines
For the casual observer it is fascinating to watch the orderly and seemingly choreographed motion of hundreds or even thousands of fish, birds or insects. However, the formation and the manifold motion patterns of such flocks raise numerous questions fundamental to the understanding of complex systems. -
20:23Passengers who fly in Developing World countries face 13 times the risk of being killed in an air accident as passengers in the First World. The more economically advanced countries in the Developing World have better overall safety records than the others, but even their death risk per flight is seven times as high as that in First World countries.
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20:23For the first time, it's possible to experimentally capture a global snapshot of the conformation of thousands of RNA molecules in a cell. The finding is important because this scrappy little sister of DNA has recently been shown to be much more complex than previously thought.
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20:23Apple CEO Steve Jobs says iPhone users will be getting a software update that offers the ability to upload high-definition video over Wi-Fi.
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20:23Biologists at the University of California, Riverside have found that voluntary activity, such as daily exercise, is a highly heritable trait that can be passed down genetically to successive generations.
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20:23Climate change could reduce key harvests in China by a fifth if the gloomiest scenarios prove true, according to a study on Wednesday.
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20:23Expanding their scope of study on the mechanisms of bacterial infection, researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have reported the surprise finding from a small clinical study that cranberry juice cocktail blocked a strain of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) from beginning the process of infection.
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20:23New findings show the value of genetic studies across human populations and the value of the latest DNA sequencing technologies to interrogate genetic variation. The results, from the latest phase of the international HapMap Project, are reported in Nature.
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20:23Lizards are an important indicator species for understanding the condition of specific ecosystems. Their body weight is a crucial index for evaluating species health, but lizards are seldom weighed, perhaps due in part to the recurring problem of spontaneous tail loss when lizards are in stress.
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20:23(AP) -- Greenpeace said about 500,000 Facebook users have urged the world's largest social network to abandon plans to buy electricity from a coal-based energy company for its new data center in the U.S.
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20:23(PhysOrg.com) -- A long-held assumption about asymmetrical division of stem cells has cracked. Researchers at the University of Oregon report that the mitotic spindle does not act alone -- that cortical proteins help to position a cleavage furrow in the right location.
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20:23The use of salt to deice pavement can leave urban streams toxic to aquatic life, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study on the influence of winter runoff in northern US cities, with a special focus on eastern Wisconsin and Milwaukee.
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20:23'Mindfulness', the process of learning to become more aware of our ongoing experiences, increases well-being in adolescent boys, a new study reports.
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20:23Scientists are reporting new evidence that the fat tissue in those spare tires and lower belly pooches - far from being a dormant storage depot for surplus calories - is an active organ that sends chemical signals to other parts of the body, perhaps increasing the risk of heart attacks, cancer, and other diseases.
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20:23In the war against antibiotics, bacteria aren't selfish. According to a new report from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers, a handful of resistant pathogens can protect an entire colony.
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20:23Measurements taken* at the National Institute of Standards and Technology may help physicists develop a clearer understanding of high-temperature superconductors, whose behavior remains in many ways mysterious decades after their discovery. A new copper-based compound exhibits properties never before seen in a superconductor and could be a step toward solving part of the mystery.
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20:23Older adults with diabetes who have high blood pressure, walk slowly or lose their balance, or believe they're in bad health, are significantly more likely to have weaker memory and slower, more rigid cognitive processing than those without these problems, according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association.
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20:23With a brilliant, finely tuned spark of ultraviolet (UV) light, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology helped NASA scientists successfully position a crucial UV sensor inside a space-borne instrument to observe a "hidden" layer of the Sun where violent space weather can originate.
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20:23A team of researchers, led by Yizheng Wang, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, has identified a way to preserve nerve cells in a rat model of stroke.
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20:23Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have demonstrated a microminiaturized device that can make complex viscosity measurements -- critical data for a wide variety of fields dealing with things that have to flow -- on sample sizes as small as a few nanoliters. Currently a table-top prototype, the NIST rheometer could be a particularly valuable tool for biotechnologists studying minute quantities of complex materials that must function in confined spaces.
Naposledy aktualizované zdroje
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ScienceDaily (dnes, 03:53)
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BBC Science/Nature (dnes, 03:47)
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NYT > Science (dnes, 03:29)
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Yahoo! (dnes, 01:22)
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ScienceNOW (dnes, 01:12)
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National Geographic News (dnes, 00:48)
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CBC - Technology & Science News (24. 5, 22:49)
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Discovery (24. 5, 22:06)
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Guardian Unlimited Science (24. 5, 22:00)
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EurekAlert (24. 5, 06:00)
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TIME (23. 5, 08:40)
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NASA (18. 5, 07:24)
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Technology Review Feed - Tech Review Top Stories (16. 1, 22:07)
