In the tropics, carbon from cleared forests goes straight to the atmosphere.

Science Friday (audio)

When homo sapiens made their entrance 100,000 years ago they were confronted by a wide range of other early humans - homo erectus, who walked better and used fire; homo habilis who used tools; and of course the Neanderthals, who were brawny and strong. But shortly after their arrival, something happened that vaulted the species forward and made them the indisputable masters of the planet.

Did our Neolithic ancestors turn to agriculture so that they could be sure of a tipple? US Archaeologist Patrick McGovern thinks so. The expert on identifying traces of alcohol in prehistoric sites reckons the thirst for a brew was enough of an incentive to start growing crops.

Stuart A. Kauffman studies the origin of life and the origins of molecular organization. Thirty-five years ago, he developed the Kauffman models, which are random networks exhibiting a kind of self-organization that he terms "order for free." He asks a question that goes beyond those asked by other evolutionary theorists: if selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization (order for free) and selection?

By revamping radiocarbon dating, Tom Higham is painting a new picture of humans' arrival in Europe.

Both pairs of photons are entangled, so that the two particles in the first set are entangled with each other, and the two particles in the second set are entangled with each other. Then, one photon from each pair is sent to a person named Victor. Of the two particles that are left behind, one goes to Bob, and the other goes to Alice. But now, Victor has control over Alice and Bob's particles. If he decides to entangle the two photons he has, then Alice and Bob's photons, each entangled with one of Victor's, also become entangled with each other. And Victor can choose to take this action at any time, even after Bob and Alice may have measured, changed or destroyed their photons.

"delayed-choice entanglement swapping."

from “The Brain Wars: The Scientific Battle Over the Existence of the Mind and the Proof That Will Change the Way We Live Our Lives.” – Mario Beauregard

We are, he explains, the only species to experience a distinct plateauing in mid-life, as opposed to the steady wind-down from young adulthood to death experienced by everything from hamsters to elephants. And this, he insists, is thanks to centuries of evolutionary biology.

"We have found a neuropsychological basis for spirituality, but it's not isolated to one specific area of the brain," said Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in the School of Health Professions. "Spirituality is a much more dynamic concept that uses many parts of the brain. Certain parts of the brain play more predominant roles, but they all work together to facilitate individuals' spiritual experiences."

A study of more than 200,000 Australians adds to the growing body of evidence that people who sit the most die the soonest.

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs must have ejected billions of tons of life-bearing rock into space. Now physicists have calculated what must have happened to it.

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 "landmark" publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development. Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

A U.S. Geological Survey research team has linked oil and natural gas drilling operations to a series of recent earthquakes from Alabama to the Northern Rockies. According to the study led by USGS geophysicist William Ellsworth, the spike in earthquakes since 2001 near oil and gas extraction operations is “almost certainly man-made.” The research team cites underground injection of drilling wastewater as a possible cause.

A controversial new study of honeybee deaths has deepened a bitter dispute over whether the developed world’s most popular pesticides are causing an ecological catastrophe.

Based on experimental forecasting, odds are close to 40 percent that La Niña will return for a third winter, according to Boulder-based NOAA climate scientist Klaus Wolter, who emphasized that’s not the official outlook from NOAA or the Climate Prediction Center.

"Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain's connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables -- folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric,"

Altaeros has successfully tested a 35-foot scale prototype in Limestone, Maine, in which the aereostat autonomously climbed to 350 feet. Using its Southwest Skystream turbine, it produced twice as much power at altitude as it did at ground level, and then landed.

For nearly six years, a mysterious condition called colony collapse disorder (CCD) has been wreaking havoc with the honey bee population in the US and Europe. The cause of CCD remains elusive, with various fingers being pointed at mites, fungi, viruses, pesticides, and even cell phone emissions. Today, a pair of studies were published in Science that suggest that sublethal exposure to a family of common pesticides called neonicotinoids might play a contributing role in the great bee die-off.

This visualization shows ocean surface currents around the world during the period from June 2005 through Decmeber 2007

This map shows you the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US.
[somewhat cpu intensive]

In a study published online today in 'Science', the researchers show that in mice, exposure to microbes in early life can reduce the body’s inventory of invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells, which help to fight infection but can also turn on the body, causing a range of disorders such as asthma or inflammatory bowel disease.

If a law of nature is not patentable, then neither is a process reciting a law of nature, unless that process has additional features that provide practical assurance that the process is more than a drafting effort designed to monopolize the law of nature itself.

Thornton is a leader in a movement to do for proteins what the scientists in Jurassic Park did for dinosaurs: bring ancient forms back to life, so that they can be studied in the flesh. “Instead of passively observing things as most evolutionary biologists do, you actively go in and test the hypotheses experimentally,”

In a study just published in Geophysical Research Letters, a team of engineers at Stanford has harnessed a sophisticated weather model to recommend optimal placement of four interconnected wind farms off the coast of the Eastern United States, a region that accounts for 34 percent of the nation’s electrical demand and 35 percent of carbon dioxide emissions.

Conventional wisdom tells us that stress can make us sick. This seems likely enough, though science hasn't exactly mapped all the mechanisms that would explain the connection. Now a new study highlights which immune system compounds could be to blame, making it clear that reducing stress could enhance immunity.

One hundred fifty years of research proves that shorter work hours actually raise productivity and profits -- and overtime destroys them. So why do we still do this?

"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." – Churchill, 1947

Previously overlooked patterns in the cave art of southern France and Spain suggest that man might have learned written communication 25,000 years earlier than we thought

NASA today has provided some amazing views of the Moon through two new videos. In this first video, we get to visit different crater sites up close through photos and videos, taken with the latest scientific equipment available. This second video might even be cooler - it shows animation of how the moon evolved, from its beginnings about 4.5 billion years ago, to crater creation through meteor bombardment.

And so it begins. For years, evolutionary biologists have predicted that new human species would start popping up in Asia as we begin to look closely at fossilised bones found there. A new analysis of bones from south-west China suggests there's truth to the forecast.

The Myth and Mystery of UFOs – Thomas E. Bullard

Try as we might to imagine ETs that are not like us, we remain the baseline. In The Myth and Mystery of UFOs, Thomas Bullard suggests that this may be more interesting than merely evidence of compulsive anthropocentrism and a limited imagination.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that passphrases are much more secure than passwords, even if the password is complex. Passphrases are likely to be more secure than passwords, but not as secure as many seem to think.

Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society

They did more than wonder: they experimented. They choked chickens, gagged fish, strangled dogs and dissected living cats. They transfused blood from a sheep to a human. They tried to imprison a spider inside a circle of powdered unicorn's horn. They also suffocated mice; but according to their first chronicler, they themselves breathed "a freer air" and conversed quietly "without being ingag'd in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age". These men lived in a world of plague, fire, war, public execution, witchcraft, alchemy, religious hatred, political ferment and precarious patronage: but they made it a rule to discuss neither God nor politics, nor news "other than what concern'd our business of Philosophy".

Henrik Ehrsson uses mannequins, rubber arms and virtual reality to create body illusions, all in the name of neuroscience.

What we need are really pit crews for patients. While we might idealize doctors and seek out specialists for everything, they're costly and not always available when we need them to be. The result is partial care.
TED: Atul Gawande

Conventional wisdom says that weight gain or loss is based on the energy balance model of "calories in, calories out," which is often reduced to the simple refrain, "eat less, and exercise more." But new research reveals a far more complex equation that appears to rest on several other important factors affecting weight gain.

New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe – 10,000 years before the Siberian-originating ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World.

A new study by University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn and colleagues presents a reconstruction of this fossilized forest, lending insight into the ecology and climate of its time.

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.

The good news is that, in the centuries since Hume, scientists have mostly managed to work around this mismatch as they've continued to discover new cause-and-effect relationships at a blistering pace. This success is largely a tribute to the power of statistical correlation, which has allowed researchers to pirouette around the problem of causation. Though scientists constantly remind themselves that mere correlation is not causation, if a correlation is clear and consistent, then they typically assume a cause has been found -- that there really is some invisible association between the measurements.

But here's the bad news: the reliance on correlations has entered an age of diminishing returns. At least two major factors contribute to this trend. First, all of the easy causes have been found, which means that scientists are now forced to search for ever-subtler correlations, mining that mountain of facts for the tiniest of associations. Is that a new cause? Or just a statistical mistake? The line is getting finer; science is getting harder. Second -- and this is the biggie -- searching for correlations is a terrible way of dealing with the primary subject of much modern research: those complex networks at the centre of life.

"Those of us who grew up in the sixties, when we put men on the Moon, now have to watch as every Republican candidate for this year's presidential election denies the science behind climate change and evolution. That is a staggering state of affairs and it is very worrying,"

Archaeologists working in eastern Jordan have announced the discovery of 20,000-year-old hut structures, the earliest yet found in the Kingdom. The finding suggests that the area was once intensively occupied and that the origins of architecture in the region date back twenty millennia, before the emergence of agriculture.

As the circuitry of NAND flash-based, solid-state drives shrinks, performance drops precipitously . . . This makes the future of SSDs cloudy.

A NASA-led science team has created an accurate, high-resolution map of the height of Earth's forests. The map will help scientists better understand the role forests play in climate change and how their heights influence wildlife habitats within them, while also helping them quantify the carbon stored in Earth's vegetation.

The archetype of the monster is an expression of this primal fear writ large, exaggerated and intensified to an outlandish degree. But why does this primal fear take the form of a “monster,” that is, a predatory creature that grotesquely mixes animal or human-and-animal physical features? In what way did our experiences as a prey species contribute to the formation of the mythic monster ?

"But the uncertainty does not always come from the disturbing influence of the measurement, but from the quantum nature of the particle itself."

Flow has been maddeningly difficult to pin down, let alone harness, but a wealth of new technologies could soon allow us all to conjure up this state. The plan is to provide a short cut to virtuosity, slashing the amount of time it takes to master a new skill - be it tennis, playing the piano or marksmanship.

"For centuries it has been believed that heat can only destroy the magnetic order. Now we have successfully demonstrated that it can, in fact, be a sufficient stimulus for recording information on a magnetic medium."

A team from Yale University has discovered a fungus deep in the South American rainforest that can live entirely on plastic - offering hope for new methods of waste disposal.

In the first comprehensive satellite study of its kind, a University of Colorado at Boulder-led team used NASA data to calculate how much Earth's melting land ice is adding to global sea level rise.

In a disturbing trend, anti-evolution campaigners are combining with climate change deniers to undermine public education

The authors suggest three reasonable ways to avoid hurricane damage: 1) increase the maximum wind speed that designs can handle; 2) make sure the turbine can quickly turn into the direction of rapidly changing winds; and 3) build most offshore wind farms in areas with lower risk.

Yesterday, a series of documents that allegedly originated form the Heartland were leaked to a prominent climate blog.

The Heartland Institute — a self-described "think tank" that actually serves in part as a way for climate change denialism to get funded — has a potentially embarrassing situation on their hands. Someone going by the handle "Heartland Insider" has anonymously released quite a few of what are claimed to be internal documents from Heartland, revealing the Institute’s strategies, funds, and much more.

One of the most mind-blowing areas of quantum mechanics is entanglement: two or more particles separated in space can have physical properties that are correlated. A measurement performed on one particle will tell us the result of the same measurement taken on an entangled particle.

a larger version of "The Scale of the Universe 2"