World's Oldest Rocks Found

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 28, @11:50PM

from the and-jagger-wants-'em-back dept.

Smivs writes"The BBC reports that Earth's most ancient rocks, with an age of 4.28 billion years, have been found on the shore of Hudson Bay, Canada. Writing in Science journal, a team reports finding that a sample of Nuvvuagittuq greenstone is 250 million years older than any rocks known. It may even hold evidence of activity by ancient life forms. If so, it would be the earliest evidence of life on Earth — but co-author Don Francis cautioned that this had not been established. 'The rocks contain a very special chemical signature — one that can only be found in rocks which are very, very old,' he said."

Senate finally passes Renewable Energy Bill

by SHAWN SCHUSTER
Sep 25th 2008 @ 4:19PM

Filed under: Gadgets and Tech, Polit-eco, Alternative Energy

The Renewable Energy Tax Creditmeasure has finally passed the U.S. Senate and now we look towards what this may mean for most Americans. This new bill will cost around $17 billion over the next ten years and is aimed to stimulate growth in the clean tech sector. It will cut costs of both residential and commercial solar installations, pump $1.5 billion into carbon capture technology and another $1 billion towards an incentive program to get power plants to cut their carbon output.

What does this mean for us? Well, it means that the government has finally stepped up to the plate and is rewarding those of us who are interested in making a difference in alternative energy. It means that the big-wigs in Washington have finally realized that this isn't just something that will blow over; change needs to happen now. It also means a bit of an economic stimulus which a recent study indicates would help create almost half a million high-paying jobs for Americans.

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TESLA CTO TALKS BLUESTAR, THE AFFORDABLE ELECTRIC AUTO

by Tim Stevens, posted Sep 25th 2008 at 12:37PM

Despite not making any lusty noises when tearing away from a stoplight, Tesla's eco-friendly supercar the Roadsterstill sets our hearts aflutter. Its price, however, makes our bank accounts sad, so we're happy to report the company is still working hard to develop an affordable option dubbed "Bluestar." Tesla CTO JB Straubel recently spoke about green transportation at MIT's Emerging Technologies Conference, elaborating on earlier plans to build a $20,000 - $30,000 family car that, he hopes, could some day result in hundreds of thousands of sales per year. Given the company thus far has shipped just 27 cars, a partnership with some major automotive player will almost certainly be required, and as SUV-dependent 'Merican manufacturers continue to suffer we think any of them would be wise to play along.

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Unique Dark-energy Probe To Measure More Than A Million Galaxies And Quasars

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2008) — The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) uses a 2.5-meter telescope with a wider field of view than any other large telescope, located on a mountaintop in New Mexico called Apache Point and devoted solely to mapping the universe. We now know that some three-quarters of the universe consists of dark energy, whose very existence was unsuspected when telescope construction began in 1994 and still controversial when the first Sloan survey started in 2000.

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ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2008) — Neuroscientists at Children's Hospital Boston have identified the first known "master switch" in brain cells to orchestrate the formation and maintenance of inhibitory synapses, essential for proper brain function. The factor, called Npas4, regulates more than 200 genes that act in various ways to calm down over-excited cells, restoring a balance that is thought to go askew in some neurologic disorders.

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ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2008) — When meeting someone for the first time, the second question that is usually asked (following “what’s your name?”) is “where do you live?” Until recently, it was not apparent just how revealing that answer may be. Although behavioral research has suggested that people who are extremely outgoing have a tendency to relocate often, was unknown if specific areas attract particular personality types.

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Hubble Spies Galaxy Silhouettes

ScienceDaily (Sep. 19, 2008) — NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a rare alignment between two spiral galaxies. The outer rim of a small, foreground galaxy is silhouetted in front of a larger background galaxy. Skeletal tentacles of dust can be seen extending beyond the small galaxy's disk of starlight.

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American Kids Most Medicated

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2008) — American children are approximately three times more likely to be prescribed psychotropic medication than children in Europe. A new study claims that the differences may be accounted for by regulatory practices and cultural beliefs about the role of medication in emotional and behavioural problems.

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Wind energy continues to roll in Texas

by JOSH LOPOSER
Sep 25th 2008 @ 9:00AM

Filed under: GreenTech, Alternative Energy

While there are some troubling signs that greentech investments might be stunted by the current troubles on Wall Street, it seems that the wind developments in west Texas are weathering the storm quite nicely. Developers like German-based E.ONare moving ahead with plans to invest $10B in what is beginning to be perceived as a safe and proven commodity -- wind farms. Currently, they're sinking $1.5B into what will become the world's largest windfarm in Roscoe, TX -- if only for a short time.

Just as fast as investors are warming up to the potential of wind energy, many landowners are dropping their objections as they witness their neighbors raking in a pretty nice chunk of change. On average, landowners are getting around $900/month per windmill on their property, plus a piece of the royalties once the windmills are plugged in -- I have no idea how much that could be. 

As much as we've heard about clean coal throughout this election season, permits to build new plants are getting more and more difficult to obtain -- even in Texas. This, coupled with the demand for clean energy, is helping to funnel even more investments into wind farms.Now, how do 

NASA Identifies Carbon-rich Molecules In Meteors As The ‘Origin Of Life

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2008) — Tons, perhaps tens of tons, of carbon molecules in dust particles and meteorites fall on Earth daily. Meteorites are especially valuable to astronomers because they provide relatively big chunks of carbon molecules that are easily analyzed in the laboratory. In the past few years, researchers have noticed that most meteorite carbon are molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are very stable compounds and are survivors.

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Hawaiian Scientists Take Their Test Tubes Surfing

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2008) — Chemists have traded their white coats for swim shorts at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu - they've shunned the lab so they can swim out to the breakers with a test-tube built into a boogie-board.

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RIAA Loses $222K Verdict

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday September 25, @12:10PM

from the turning-tide dept.

jriding writes"The $222,000 verdict against Jammy Thomas for copyright infringement by P2P is no more. US District Court Judge Michael Davis dismissed the verdict, saying it was based on the faulty 'making available' theory of distribution."

Quarter of Workers' Time Online Is Personal

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday September 25, @10:03AM

from the this-is-why-we-created-the-idle-section dept.

sloit writes"Most people spend more than 25 per cent of their time online at work on personal activities. And 80 per cent of emails sent by volume in the workplace are personal. Bosses often have no way of tracking Internet activity or policies to define what staff can and cannot do. Paul Hortop, who reviews company network security for consultancy Voco, said the most common websites visited by personal web surfers were online trading sites, instant messaging/chat services and peer-to-peer sharing sites (allowing movie, music and software sharing)."

 [+] internet (tagging beta)

CHINA TAKES THE LEAP: EMDRIVE AKA INFINITE IMPROBABILITY DRIVE NOW IN DEVELOPMENT

by Stephanie Patterson, posted Sep 25th 2008 at 5:03AM

While the rest of the world was in some kind of mass coma over the past year, China decided to have a hand at building the highly controversial Emdrive (electromagnetic drive) -- an engine that uses microwaves to transform electrical energy into thrust, all in a comparably light-weight, efficient package. The end result could mean 41 day journeys to Mars, not to mention terrestrial vehicle propulsion and satellite applications. Perpetual motion malarkey you say? British scientist and originator of the concept, Roger Shawyer of Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd. (SPR), assures you it's nothing of the kind, and Chinese Professor Yang Juan concurs. Research headed by Juan at Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) in Xi'an commenced in June 2007, and a thruster now being built based on Shawyer's theories is scheduled for completion by the end of this year. Meanwhile in the US: cue the sound of crickets.

[Via Wired]

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New European Record Efficiency For Solar Cells Achieved: 39.7%

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2008) — At 39.7% efficiency for a multi-junction solar cell, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE in Freiburg have exceeded their own European record of 37.6% which they achieved just a short time ago. III-V semiconductor multi-junction solar cells are used in photovoltaic concentrator technology for solar power stations.

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Global Solar Wind Plasma Output At 50-Year Low, Ulysses Spacecraft Reveals

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2008) — Data from the Ulysses spacecraft, a joint NASA-European Space Agency mission, show the sun has reduced its output of solar wind to the lowest levels since accurate readings became available. The sun's current state could reduce the natural shielding that envelops our solar system.

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Missing Link Of Neutron Stars? Bizarre Hibernating Stellar Magnet Discovered

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2008) — Astronomers have discovered a most bizarre celestial object that emitted 40 visible-light flashes before disappearing again. It is most likely to be a missing link in the family of neutron stars, the first case of an object with an amazingly powerful magnetic field that showed some brief, strong visible-light activity.

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Casio goes insane with 2-inch, 960 x 540 pixel LCD

by Thomas Ricker, posted Sep 25th 2008 at 1:54AM

To put Casio's achievement into perspective, those 7-inch PMPs and UMPCs generally equipped with 800 x 480 LCDs are now kicking the dirt in embarrassment at being outdone by the pixel density of Casio's new 2-inch display. Using a proprietary Hyper Amorphous Silicon TFT (HAST) LCD, Casio achieves a 960 x 540 pixel resolution resulting in 546 pixels per inch supporting 16.8 million colors -- hoozah! Although not announced, we'll undoubtedly see these in future NTT DoCoMo superphones just as soon as these displays hit mass production.

[Via Akihabara News]

Students Are Always Half Right In Pittsburgh

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday September 23, @11:26PM
from the think-of-the-children dept.

Pittsburgh Public Schools officials have enacted a policy that sets 50 percent as the minimum score a student can receive for assignments, tests and other work. District spokeswoman Ebony Pugh said, the 50 percent minimum gives children a chance to catch up and a reason to keep trying. If a student gets a 20 percent in a class for the first marking period, he or she would need a 100 percent during the second marking period just to squeak through the semester. The district and teachers union issued a joint memo to ensure staff members' compliance with the policy, which was already on the books but enforced only at some schools. At this rate, it won't be long before schools institute double extra credit Mondays and Fridays to ensure students don't take three day weekends.

So will that be Credit or Debit?

So how do you answer this one?

House passes No Child Left Inside

by PATRICIA MAYVILLE-COX
Sep 24th 2008 @ 10:10AM

Filed under: Kids and Parenting, Polit-eco

Here's some good news from our nation's capitol for a change. The House passed the "No Child Left Inside Act" last week, a bill that would put more federal dollars towards environmental education. The act would provide $500 million in federal dollars, over the next five years, to strengthen environmental education programs in public schools. 

According to Plenty, proponents of the bill hope it will stem some of the damage done by No Child Left Behind (NCLB). NCLB, with its emphasis on test scores, has caused some school districts to limit science and social studies in order to spend more time on math and language arts. 

Getting kids outside more should also help stem the rise in "nature deficit disorder," a term coined by Richard Louv in his book, "Last Child in the Woods." Nature deficit disorder is what happens to young people when they become disconnected from nature. Louv links this lack of nature to the rise in obesity, attention disorders and depression in our nation's children.

Let's hope this bill passes and gets signed into law. Anything that helps gets kids outside is a good thing.

What do you think? Is environmental education something worth putting federal dollars towards?

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Lack Of Large-scale Experiments Slows Progress Of Environmental Restoration

ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2008) — A new study finds that environmental restoration research using large experimental tests has been limited. The study, published in Restoration Ecology, maintains that for restoration to progress as a science and a practice, more research should be done on whole ecosystems with large experiments.

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Saturn's Rings May Be Very Old

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 23, @04:23PM

from the even-older-than-bob dept.

Kristina from Science News writes"Combining computer simulations with data about the way starlight shines through Saturn's rings suggests the individual grains are big and thus could have been around a good 4 billion years, not the mere 10 million to 100 million previously suspected. What may have thrown earlier observations off is the chance that the grains aren't evenly distributed, but clump here and spread out there."

"Dark Flow" Outside Observable Universe

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 24, @01:47AM

from the here-comes-galactus dept.

DynaSoar writes"NASA astrophysicists have discovered what they claim is something outside the observable universe exerting an effect on the observable. The material is pulling clusters of galaxiestowards a region of space known not to contain sufficient matter to create the effect. They can only speculate on what the material is and how space might differ there: "In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn't contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.""

New 3D Visualization Tool For Early Diagnosis Of Breast Cancer

ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2008) — Scientists from Finland, Germany and the ESRF have developed a new X-ray technique for the early detection of breast cancer. This allows a 3D visualization of the breast with a high spatial resolution and is extremely sensitive to alterations in the tissue, such as those generated by cancer. This technique could be used in the next years in hospitals. It may help doctors to detect tumours with greater precision than is possible using current X-ray mammography.

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Want clean air? Head to the southern hemisphere

by JOSH LOPOSER
Sep 23rd 2008 @ 1:01PM

Filed under: News, Climate Change

If you're the type who likes to scout out new eco-tourism adventures, you might want to consider a clean air getaway. Where does one find this type of excursion? Well, pretty much anywhere south of the equator. Scientists at Britain's University of York recently discovered a chemical boundary hovering over the equatorthat serves as a barrier to the North's nasty pollution -- preventing it from dirtying up the southern hemisphere's pristine air.

Obviously, since roughly 90% of the world's population resides north of the equator, the air up here is substantially dirtier than down south. Still, scientists hadn't quite discovered why the pollution didn't distribute itself more evenly across the globe -- the north experiences carbon monoxide levels 4 times higher. With the discovery of this chemical boundary, scientists will be able to track pollution levels much more accurately -- and southerners can breathe easy, knowing that a30-mile wide band of chemicals is protecting their atmosphere. 

I wonder if this has anything to do with why Arctic sea ice is facing a collapse while Antarctic ice is still growing?

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The man who keeps all of his trash in his basement

by PATRICIA MAYVILLE-COX
Sep 23rd 2008 @ 11:00AM

Filed under: News

With a headline like that, this sounds like a story of those people who end up on intervention shows on daytime TV due to hoarding issues. But no, in this case, it is an experiment in sustainability.

Meet Dave Chameides, a man who never tosses anything in the trash. So where does his trash go? According to a recent profile in Time, Chameides decided that he would keep all of the garbage he created, whether at home or on the road...and he would keep it in his house. 

Chameides uses a worm composter for organic waste and recycles everything he can. But the rest of his trash goes into his basement in his L.A. home. The project has been going on for almost a year. His wife and kids are exempt.

So why is Dave doing this? Dave says he wants to understand more about his "waste footprint." You read more about Dave's adventures in trash-collecting on his blog Sustainable Dave.

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Breast Cancer Survivors Have High Quality Of Life Up To 15 Years After Lumpectomy And Radiation

ScienceDaily (Sep. 23, 2008) — Women with breast cancer who are treated with lumpectomy and radiation report a high level of overall quality of life several years after treatment that is comparable to a general sampling of the adult women U.S. population according to a survey conducted by physicians at Fox Chase Cancer Center.

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Healthy Blood Vessels May Prevent Fat Growth

ScienceDaily (Sep. 23, 2008) — The cells lining blood vessels are known to be important for maintaining health, but researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine believe these cells may perform an unsuspected task – controlling the development of fat cells.

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Why Chemo Works For Some People And Not Others

ScienceDaily (Sep. 23, 2008) — MIT researchers have shown that cells from different people don't all react the same way when exposed to the same DNA-damaging agent — a finding that could help clinicians predict how patients will respond to chemotherapy.

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Car wars '08: McCain owns 13 cars... Obama drives a plane

by JOSH LOPOSER
Sep 22nd 2008 @ 1:10PM

Filed under: Cars and Transportation, Celebrities, Polit-eco

As part of an effort to portray senator John McCain as aristocratic and out-of-touch, the Obama camp has seized upon some and very ungreen information about McCain's automotive habits: he owns 13 cars. In the scuppie bible, that kind of wanton ownership of unecessary expensive items most certainly constitutes a mortal eco-sin. To make matters worse, two of these cars are foreign-made -- a Honda and a Volkswagen. Unbelievable, yet it's true.

Obama, so they say, owns only one car -- a 2008 Ford Escape Hybrid. Of course, he (or possibly his campaign) is also the proud owner of a Boeing 757, aka the O-Force One. Great name, but it's not exactly the greenest campaign vehicle on the road. That title might go to Washington's incumbent governor Chris Gregoire and her biodiesel campaign bus. 

Gallery: Presidential Candidates and Their Rides

Benefit Of Combination Therapy For Alzheimer's Disease Confirmed

ScienceDaily (Sep. 23, 2008) — Extended treatment with Alzheimer's disease drugs can significantly slow the rate at which the disorder advances, and combination therapy with two different classes of drugs is even better at helping patients maintain their ability to perform daily activities.

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Chemical in sunscreens found to mimic female hormones

by PATRICIA MAYVILLE-COX
Sep 22nd 2008 @ 9:14AM

Filed under: Natural Body Care

A new study, published inToxicology and Applied Pharmacology, has found that UV filters, known as benzophenone (BP) derivatives, act as endocrine disruptors. BP derivatives are found in chemical sunscreens, but are also found in many other personal products.

These BP derivatives can mimic the effect of the female hormone estrogen and interfere with the action of the male hormone, testosterone. The study found that these effects can be detected at levels found in human blood after applying sunscreen. Also, because these UV filters are by definition stable to light, they do not breakdown in sunlight, and therefore can bioaccumulate in the environment.

For sunblocks, an alternative to these chemical sunscreens are the physical sunblocks, which contain titanium dioxide or zinc oxide as the active ingredient. Physical sunblocks block or reflect light. An added bonus is that physical sunblocks don't kill coral reefs, unlike some chemical sunscreens. Make sure whatever sunblock you choose is a broad spectrum product that protects against UV-A and UV-B rays.

Man, hoping the world is full of idiots, sells air in a can

by RIGEL CELESTE
Sep 23rd 2008 @ 10:09AM

Filed under: News

Kevin DelGaudio is an ex-hardware store manager turned entrepreneur who's putting his proverbial "eggs" into a basket called "Instant Oxygen."

That's right, he's selling air in a can. 

For $16 a pop.

He compares his product (which consists of "99% breathing oxygen" sold in 8 ounce tubes for $16 each at Duane Reade pharmacies in New York) to bottled water. He reminds us how people said that was a stupid idea at first, but look at the water industry now?

Yeah, that's totally not the same. Do people really think the world is running short of oxygen? (Brings a whole new meaning to the term "gas prices.") The funny part is that he will probably make a killing -- somebody out there could be buying themselves some "Instant Oxygen" right now.

Good for them. I prefer Perri-Air myself.

[via Book of Joe]

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