|  How these energy geeks are reimagining an old school utility  | By Nichola Groom Orange County, Ca (Reuters) - Welcome to the utility industry's future - or at least that's what Southern California Edison is hoping. Here in a non-descript, 53,500-square-foot building, the $12 billion utility's research team is testing everything from charging electronic vehicles via cell phone to devices that smooth out the power created by rooftop solar panels. Those are some of the roughly 60 projects in the works at Edison's Advanced Technology division. The engineers from California's largest utility are hatching plans to insure its survival - and maybe even the survival of the nation's other big utilities, which are watching the project closely. The lab was formed by Southern California Edison in 2009 after California passed a landmark law to lower its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels - and source one third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. The result has been more electric vehicles here in the Golden State.
| Read More » Astronaut Sees Huge Winter Storm from Space (Photos)  | The monster winter storm that dumped loads of snow on the northeastern United States on Monday and Tuesday (Jan. 26 and 27) looked pretty beastly from 250 miles (400 kilometers) above the planet. NASA astronaut Terry Virts, a member of the current Expedition 42 crew aboard the International Space Station, captured several dramatic photos of the storm Tuesday night, as it wheeled and churned over New England. For example, the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite, which is operated jointly by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), looked on as the storm hammered the Northeast early Tuesday morning, when it was near peak intensity. "The nighttime lights of the region were blurred by the high cloud tops associated with the most intense parts of the storm," NASA officials wrote about the satellite image.
| Read More » 'Expensive' placebo beats 'cheap' one in Parkinson's disease: study By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) - When patients with Parkinson's disease received an injection described as an effective drug costing $1,500 per dose, their motor function improved significantly more than when they got one supposedly costing $100, scientists reported on Wednesday. The research, said an editorial in the journal Neurology, which published it, "takes the study of placebo effect to a new dimension." More and more studies have documented the power of placebos, in which patients experience an improvement in symptoms despite receiving sugar pills, sham surgery, or other intervention with no intrinsic therapeutic value. Earlier studies have shown that patients' expectations can lead to improvements in Parkinson's, a progressive motor disease in which the brain's production of dopamine plummets. As it happens, dopamine release is increased by belief, novelty, and the expectation of reward - mental states that underlie placebo effects, said neurologist Alberto Espay of the University of Cincinnati, who led the new study. Read More » Tape: Scientist offers to build nuke bomb targeting New York  | ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist told an undercover FBI agent he could build 40 nuclear weapons for Venezuela in 10 years and design a bomb targeted for New York City.
| Read More » Prehistoric skull a key 'piece of the puzzle' in story of humanity  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A partial skull retrieved from a cave in northern Israel is shedding light on a pivotal juncture in early human history when our species was trekking out of Africa to populate other parts of the world and encountered our close cousins the Neanderthals. The researchers said characteristics of the skull, dating from a time period when members of our species were thought to have been marching out of Africa, suggest the individual was closely related to the first Homo sapiens populations that later colonized Europe. They also said the skull provides the first evidence that Homo sapiens inhabited that region at the same time as Neanderthals, our closest extinct human relative. Tel Aviv University anthropologist Israel Hershkovitz, who led the study published in the journal Nature, called the skull "an important piece of the puzzle of the big story of human evolution." Previous genetic evidence suggests our species and Neanderthals interbred during roughly the time period represented by the skull, with all people of Eurasian ancestry still retaining a small amount of Neanderthal DNA as a result.
| Read More » Crashing Electrons Could Explain Earth's Magnetic Field Mystery  | A messy paradox that has plagued geoscientists who study Earth's core and the magnetic field it produces may now be solved. It was raised in a 2012 paper in which geophysicists in the United Kingdom published a widely accepted supercomputer model that found Earth's iron core was incredibly efficient at conducting heat. In that study, the researchers examined how heat may move through the Earth's core, at the level of atoms and electrons. The implication: Earth's magnetic field shouldn't exist.
| Read More » Ex-Los Alamos scientist gets 5 years in nuclear espionage case (Reuters) - A former scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was sentenced to five years in prison on Wednesday for passing secret U.S. nuclear weapons data to a person he believed to be a Venezuelan government official, the FBI said. Pedro Leonardo Mascheroni, 79, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Argentina, pleaded guilty in June 2013 to several espionage-related offenses stemming from an undercover sting operation, according to the FBI and court records. His wife, who is 71, was previously sentenced to a year in prison and three years of supervised release for her role in the same case, the FBI said. Mascheroni, a physicist, worked from 1979 to 1988 at Los Alamos, a U.S. government facility where the first atomic bomb was developed and which still conducts nuclear weapons research. Read More » Charles Townes, co-inventor of the laser and a Nobel laureate in physics, has died at 99 Charles Townes, co-inventor of the laser and a Nobel laureate in physics, has died at 99. Read More » Nobel laureate Charles Townes, laser co-creator, dies at 99 BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) — Charles Hard Townes, the co-inventor of the laser and a Nobel laureate in physics, has died. He was 99. Read More » Laser's co-inventor, Nobel laureate Charles Townes, dead at 99  | Charles Townes, who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for invention of the laser, a feat that revolutionized science, medicine, telecommunications and entertainment, has died at age 99, the University of California at Berkeley reported. Townes, a native of South Carolina, recalled that the idea for how to create a pure beam of short-wavelength, high-frequency light first dawned on him as he sat on a Washington, D.C., park bench among blooming azaleas in the spring of 1951. Four years later, he and a brother-in-law, Arthur Schawlow, conceived of a variation on that invention to amplify a beam of optical light, instead of microwave energy, and Bell Laboratories patented the new idea as a laser. Another scientist, Theodore Maiman, was the first to demonstrate the first actual laser in 1960.
| Read More » Laser's co-inventor, Nobel laureate Charles Townes, dead at 99  | Charles Townes, who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for invention of the laser, a feat that revolutionized science, medicine, telecommunications and entertainment, has died at age 99, the University of California at Berkeley reported. Townes, a native of South Carolina, recalled that the idea for how to create a pure beam of short-wavelength, high-frequency light first dawned on him as he sat on a Washington, D.C., park bench among blooming azaleas in the spring of 1951. Four years later, he and a brother-in-law, Arthur Schawlow, conceived of a variation on that invention to amplify a beam of optical light, instead of microwave energy, and Bell Laboratories patented the new idea as a laser. Another scientist, Theodore Maiman, was the first to demonstrate the first actual laser in 1960.
| Read More » Laser's co-inventor, Nobel laureate Charles Townes, dead at 99  | Charles Townes, who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for invention of the laser, a feat that revolutionized science, medicine, telecommunications and entertainment, has died at age 99, the University of California at Berkeley reported. Townes, a native of South Carolina, recalled that the idea for how to create a pure beam of short-wavelength, high-frequency light first dawned on him as he sat on a Washington, D.C., park bench among blooming azaleas in the spring of 1951. Four years later, he and a brother-in-law, Arthur Schawlow, conceived of a variation on that invention to amplify a beam of optical light, instead of microwave energy, and Bell Laboratories patented the new idea as a laser. Another scientist, Theodore Maiman, was the first to demonstrate the first actual laser in 1960.
| Read More » AstraZeneca bets on gene editing for broad range of new drugs  | LONDON (Reuters) - AstraZeneca said on Thursday it had struck four research collaborations in the hot area of genome editing as it bets on a new technology to deliver better and more precise drugs for a range of diseases. The academic and commercial tie-ups will allow AstraZeneca to use so-called CRISPR technology across its entire drug discovery platform in areas such as oncology, cardiovascular, respiratory and immune system medicine. (Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by David Holmes)
| Read More » AstraZeneca bets on gene editing for broad range of new drugs  | By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - AstraZeneca said on Thursday it had struck four research collaborations in the hot area of genome editing as it bets on a new technology to deliver better and more precise drugs for a range of diseases. The academic and commercial tie-ups will allow British-based AstraZeneca to use so-called CRISPR technology across its entire drug discovery platform in areas such as oncology, cardiovascular, respiratory and immune system medicine. CRISPR, which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, allows scientists to edit the genes of selected cells accurately and efficiently. The collaborations with Britain's Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the Innovative Genomics Initiative in California, the Broad Institute and Whitehead Institute in Massachusetts, and Thermo Fisher Scientific build on an in-house CRISPR programme at AstraZeneca that has been running for over a year.
| Read More » Dazzling Comet Lovejoy Stars in Slooh Webcast Today: How to Watch  | To mark the occasion, the Slooh Community Observatory is hosting a live webcast today, beginning at 5:30 p.m. EST (2030 GMT). You can also watch the Comt Lovejoy webcast on Space.com. The show will feature views of the comet from Slooh's telescope in the Canary Islands, off the west coast of Africa. Slooh representatives said they plan to focus on Comet Lovejoy's amazing tail during the webcast. "Slooh's members have been watching [Comet Lovejoy] right from the early days after its discovery, capturing images of its evolution and development from a distant fuzzball to the beautiful comet we're seeing today," Slooh astronomer Will Gater said in a statement.
| Read More » NASA Launching New Earth-watching Satellite Today: Watch It Live  | NASA is scheduled to launch its next Earth-observing satellite today (Jan. 29) from California, and you can watch the liftoff live online. The agency's Soil Moisture Active Passive satellite (SMAP), designed to provide unprecedented data about Earth's soil moisture, is scheduled to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Thursday (Jan. 29) at 9:20 a.m. EST (1420 GMT). You can watch the SMAP launch live on Space.com starting at 7 a.m. EST (1200 GMT) Thursday via NASA TV. The SMAP satellite is heading to space in order to help scientists collect valuable data that could help officials better understand droughts and floods on Earth.
| Read More » African Golden Cat Attacks Monkeys in Rare Camera Trap Footage  | African golden cats are hardly ever photographed in the wild. But recently, scientists captured a much more dynamic scene: a golden cat crashing a party of red colobus monkeys in Uganda. The video, released yesterday (Jan. 27), may be the first footage of a golden cat hunting in the daylight, according to Panthera, the conservation group that released the video from inside Kibale National Park. "We know a lot more about golden cats than we did a few years ago, and yet we still know almost nothing about their behavior," David Mills, a graduate student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa, said in a statement.
| Read More » Stoppard's new play lifts the lid on brain science By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Tom Stoppard, the grand old man of British theatre, is back with his first new stage play in nine years, tackling typically big ideas: consciousness, science and God. "The Hard Problem" is a 100-minute gallop, with no interval, through neurobiology, religion and improbable "black swan" events in financial markets that is both contemporary and timeless. While the play fizzes with ideas it is arguably less successful as a human drama, and reviews of the production at the National Theatre's intimate Dorfman venue in London were mixed on Thursday. The audience gets fair warning it is in for an intellectual workout this time, from a programme that features letters between Stoppard and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on Cartesian dualism, or the separation of mind and matter. Read More » Doorstep Delivery of Shark Fin Soup Is in Bad Taste (Op-Ed) Jacqueline Savitz is vice president for U.S. oceans at Oceana. On January 28, Oceana coordinated thousands of Twitter and Facebook posts in a campaign to ask online menu-delivery service GrubHub to stop offering shark fin products on its menus nationwide. Shark fin soup, a popular Chinese delicacy, has driven up the global demand for the fins, sparking a worldwide decline in many shark species. It is estimated that 73 million sharks are killed every year to supply the demand for shark fin soup. Read More » NASA Calls Off Satellite Launch Minutes Before Liftoff Due to Winds  | The launch of NASA's newest Earth-gazing satellite will have to wait another day due to high winds that made launch too risky Thursday (Jan. 29).
| Read More » Psychopaths' Brains Don't Grasp Punishment, Scans Reveal The brains of psychopathic violent criminals have abnormalities in regions related to punishment that are not seen in the brains of violent criminals who are not psychopathic, according to new research using brain scans. This is likely why psychopaths do not benefit from rehabilitation programs, as other violent criminals often do, the scientists report today (Jan. 28) in the journal Lancet Psychiatry. Read More » Sun Protection App Works, If People Use It Want to keep your skin wrinkle free and reduce your risk of skin cancer? In two new clinical trials, researchers found that the app, called Solar Cell, encourages people to spend more time in the shade and less time in the midday sun, while also nudging them toward wearing protective, wide-brim hats. Klein Buendel is producing Solar Cell in partnership with the National Cancer Institute. Most health-related apps undergo little to no formal testing, but Buller and his colleagues conducted two clinical trials on Solar Cell, randomly assigning participants to either use the app or not while testing their sun-protection behaviors. Read More » Money, Not Marriage, Makes Parents Better When it comes to good parenting, having money matters more than being married, a new study concludes. In fact, newly released U.S. Census Bureau statistics reveal that only small variations in parenting depend on family structure, according to the study. Much more important is whether a family lives in poverty, said Sandra Hofferth, a professor of family science at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. Read More » Stoppard's new play lifts the lid on brain science  | By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Tom Stoppard, the grand old man of British theater, is back with his first new stage play in nine years, tackling typically big ideas: consciousness, science and God. "The Hard Problem" is a 100-minute gallop, with no interval, through neurobiology, religion and improbable "black swan" events in financial markets that is both contemporary and timeless. While the play fizzes with ideas it is arguably less successful as a human drama, and reviews of the production at the National Theatre's intimate Dorfman venue in London were mixed on Thursday. The audience gets fair warning it is in for an intellectual workout this time, from a program that features letters between Stoppard and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on Cartesian dualism, or the separation of mind and matter.
| Read More » Stoppard's new play lifts the lid on brain science  | By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Tom Stoppard, the grand old man of British theatre, is back with his first new stage play in nine years, tackling typically big ideas: consciousness, science and God. "The Hard Problem" is a 100-minute gallop, with no interval, through neurobiology, religion and improbable "black swan" events in financial markets that is both contemporary and timeless. While the play fizzes with ideas it is arguably less successful as a human drama, and reviews of the production at the National Theatre's intimate Dorfman venue in London were mixed on Thursday. The audience gets fair warning it is in for an intellectual workout this time, from a programme that features letters between Stoppard and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on Cartesian dualism, or the separation of mind and matter.
| Read More » Poll shows giant gap between what public, scientists think WASHINGTON (AP) — The American public and U.S. scientists are light-years apart on science issues. And 98 percent of surveyed scientists say it's a problem that we don't know what they are talking about. Read More » Radioactive Bubbles May Have Punched Holes in Supernova's Heart  | The authors of the new research theorize that expanding bubbles of radioactive nickel could have created the holes. Dan Milisavljevic, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wants to know why stars explode. "We're like the bomb squad," Milisavljevic says. The new paper by Milisavljevic and his co-author Rob Fesen of Dartmouth College, show that the wreckage of Cassiopeia A is not scattered arbitrarily.
| Read More » Rare Red Fox Spotted in Yosemite Park for 1st Time in a Century  | The elusive and rare Sierra Nevada red fox has been spotted in Yosemite National Park for the first time in nearly a century, park officials said yesterday (Jan. 28). The cameras were set up by wildlife biologists hoping to spot the red fox and the Pacific fisher, Yosemite National Park's rarest mammals. The ongoing study is funded by the Yosemite Conservancy. There hasn't been a verified sighting of the Sierra Nevada red fox inside Yosemite National Park since 1916, said Ben Sacks, director of the University of California, Davis Veterinary School's Mammalian Ecology and Conservation Unit.
| Read More » From GMOs to Climate, Public Disagrees with Scientists There are wide opinion gaps between scientists and the public on a number of big issues, from the safety of genetically modified foods to the cause of climate change, a new survey suggests. "There is a disconnect between the way in which the public perceives the state of science and science's position on a variety of issues," said Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS), in a press conference on Wednesday (Jan. 28). Read More » | |
