A cloned human would probably consider themselves to be an individual, a study suggests. Scientists drew their conclusions after interviewing identical twins about their experiences of sharing exactly the same genes with somebody else. The team said the twins believed their genes played a limited role in shaping their identity. The UK/Austrian research will shortly be published in the journal of Social Science and Medicine.

Co-author Dr Barbara Prainsack, from the University of Vienna, Austria, who worked with Professor Tim Spector, from the Twins Research Unit, St Thomas' Hospital, London, UK, said: "The birth of Dolly the sheep triggered many questions about what it would be like to be a clone. "We don't have clones we can interview - but we do have identical twins." This interesting study reveals how we should not have any prejudiced feelings about the idea of genetically identical individuals living amongst us

Identical twins are created when a single egg, fertilised by a single sperm, splits into two separate, but genetically identical, embryos. The researchers said because twins - like potential clones - shared the same genes, they offered the only existing method of studying the feelings a clone might experience. But they also emphasised twins would differ from clones because they are born at the same time, whereas clones would differ in age. The scientists carried out 17 interviews of identical, non-identical and non-twin siblings. The identical twins said being a twin did not compromise their individuality - although they pointed out that people often had preconceptions that they were one of a pair rather than individuals. Those interviewed viewed being an identical twin as a blessing, and said they would not rather be a non-identical twin or a "singleton". They also said they believed their genes had no great bearing on their relationship with their twin and their identity.

The twins felt factors such as being brought up in the same environment, having spent a large part of their lives together, and being treated in a similar way by their parents were more important. One interviewee said: "We spent 20 years together, and so that was a close experience. And that hasn't changed all of these years we've been apart. So I don't feel that genetics made any difference." From these findings the scientists said they could assume a clone would probably not feel their individuality was compromised by sharing genes with someone else; that their relationship with their co-clone was a blessing; and their uniqueness was not a negative thing.

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Research Says There Were Blond and Redheaded Woolly Mammoths

New research shows that woolly mammoths may have come in lots of colors. Scientists now believe that there may have been blond, brunette and even redheaded woolly mammoths roaming the plains.

Researchers led by Holger Roempler of the University of Leipzig in Germany were able to extract DNA from a 43,000-year-old mammoth bone from Siberia.

They report in Friday's issue of the journal Science said that the mammoth DNA included the gene Mc1r. That gene codes for a protein that affects hair color in humans and other mammals. Reduced activity of that gene produces red hair in humans and cows and yellow hair in mice, horses and dogs, for example.

Thus it is possible, the researchers concluded, that mammoths existed with a variety of hair colors.

Blond and redheaded woolly mammoths: who would have thought? Next, they'll be telling us that the dinosaurs were pink with purple spots. Although now that we think of it, they already found a dinosaur that had feathers which is more than enough to inspire some Jurassic-sized nightmares about a feathered T-Rex coming after us. So, why not pink dinosaurs?

Posted on July 6, 2006
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One Drink and You Miss the Ape

A new study on drinking reveals that having just one drink can severely impair your observational skills.

New research by the University of Washington may make you think again: Most of the study participants who had had only one cocktail didn't even notice a gorilla walking through the middle of a ballgame. That's right. The UW researchers tested people while they focused intently on a single task — counting the number of basketball passes in a video. Most of them couldn't see much else, such as realize that the clip features a woman in an ape suit who suddenly walks to center screen, beats her chest and exits — a nine-second cameo.

They were twice as likely to miss it as nondrinkers. "We were very surprised to see how strong the results were," said Seema Clifasefi, who led the research in the UW's Department of Psychology. The study was small — only 46 subjects — but it could have implications for drunken-driving laws if expanded research shows similar results, she said. Clifasefi and colleagues at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, conducted the pilot study with volunteers between 21 and 35 years old. Half got plain tonic water. But the other half got vodka tonics stiff enough, based on their weight and gender, to raise their blood-alcohol content to 0.04 percent, or half the legal limit for driving in Washington. None of the participants knew for certain what they were getting.

Each participant had 10 minutes to down the drinks. Then they were each shown a video of two three-person teams passing a basketball and asked to count the number of passes. Among the participants, only four of those who got vodka, or about 18 percent, saw the gorilla. Of the tonic-only crowd, 11, or about 46 percent, spotted the ape.

The moral of the story is this: those of you who wish to see those naughty gorillas that are planning to crash your local 4th of July celebrations should definitely stick with Coke this weekend.

Posted on June 30, 2006
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Test Tube Hamburger Heading Your Way

Wired magazine explains why test tube hamburger is coming your way soon.

What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor? Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.

Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings within the next few years. Currently involved in identifying the type of stem cells that will multiply the most to create larger quantities of meat within a bioreactor, the team hopes to have concrete results by 2009. The 2 million euro ($2.5 million) Dutch-government-funded project began in April 2005. The work is one arm of a worldwide research effort focused on growing meat from cell cultures on an industrial scale.

"All of the technology exists today to make ground meat products in vitro," says Paul Kosnik, vice president of engineering at Tissue Genesis in Hawaii. Kosnik is growing scaffold-free, self-assembled muscle. "We believe the goal of a processed meat product is attainable in the next five years if funding is available and the R&D is pursued aggressively."

A single cell could theoretically produce enough meat to feed the world's population for a year. But the challenge lies in figuring out how to grow it on a large scale. Jason Matheny, a University of Maryland doctoral student and a director of New Harvest, a nonprofit organization that funds research on in vitro meat, believes the easiest way to create edible tissue is to grow "meat sheets," which are layers of animal muscle and fat cells stretched out over large flat sheets made of either edible or removable material. The meat can then be ground up or stacked or rolled to get a thicker cut.

We have only two words for this story: Soylent Green.

Posted on June 23, 2006
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Scientists Discover Earth Is Surrounded By Popping Bubbles

Scientists made a really bizarre discovery which was announced today: the Earth is surrounded by super-hot bubbles which appear then pop out of existence. And no, we're not making this one up.

The space above you is fizzing with activity as bubbles of superhot gas constantly grow and pop around Earth, scientists announced today. Astronomers found the activity up where Earth's magnetic field meets a constant stream of particles flowing out from the Sun. While space is commonly called a vacuum, in fact there is gas everywhere, albeit not as dense as the air you breathe.

The newfound bubbles are technically called density holes. In them, gas density is 10 times lower. The gas in the bubbles is 18,000,000 Fahrenheit (10,000,000 Celsius) instead of the 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit of the surrounding hot gas, which is known as plasma [Graphic]. The bubbles were found in data collected by the European Space Agency's Cluster mission, a flotilla of four spacecraft. Researchers first thought they had an instrument glitch when the spacecrafts passed through bubbles. "Then I looked at the data from all four Cluster spacecraft. These anomalies were being observed simultaneously by all the spacecraft. That’s when I believed that they were real," said George Parks, University of California, Berkeley.

The bubbles expand to about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) and probably last about 10 seconds before bursting and being replaced by the cooler, denser solar wind, Parks and his colleagues say. It is not known for sure how the bubbles are created, but the researchers suspect it involves the solar wind colliding with the magnetic field, which forms a boundary called the bow shock. The phenomenon is similar to the wake formed by the front of a boat. The discovery, detailed in the journal Physics of Plasmas, could help astronomers better understand how this solar wind interacts with the magnetic field.

Popping bubbles that are 10,000,000 degrees Celsius? So the Earth is surrounded by boiling, popping bubbles of gas? This is just getting too freaky.

Posted on June 20, 2006
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Norway's Doomsday Vault

Norway has announced that it is building a Doomsday Vault deep in a frozen mountainside on an secluded Arctic island. The Vault will house seeds to repopulate the world with food in case of global catastrophe.

...Norway's ambitious project is on its way to becoming reality Monday when construction begins on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, designed to house as many as 3 million of the world's crop seeds. Prime ministers of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland were to attend the cornerstone ceremony on Monday morning near the town of Longyearbyen in Norway's remote Svalbard Islands, roughly 620 miles from the North Pole.

Norway's Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen has called the vault a "Noah's Ark on Svalbard." Its purpose is to ensure the survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change, and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out. The seeds, packaged in foil, would be stored at such cold temperatures that they could last hundreds, even thousands, of years, according to the independent Global Crop Diversity Trust. The trust, founded in 2004, has also worked on the project and will help run the vault, which is scheduled to open and start accepting seeds from around the world in September 2007.

Oil-rich Norway first proposed the idea a year ago, drawing wide international interest, Riis-Johansen said. The Svalbard Archipelago, 300 miles north of the mainland, was selected because it is located far from many threats and has a consistently cold climate. Those factors will help protect the seeds and safeguard their genetic makeup, Norway's Foreign Ministry said. The vault will have thick concrete walls, and even if all cooling systems fail, the temperature in the frozen mountain will never rise above freezing due to permafrost, it said.

The Vault will cost $4.8 million to build. There are already 1,400 seed banks all over the world to be used in case crops are wiped out. But none of those seed banks is as secure as the one the Norwegians are building. Any country can deposit seeds in the new vault; the Global Crop Diversity Trust is coordinating and helping to pay for the deposits for developing countries, which is really a pretty cool thing.

Posted on June 19, 2006
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Stephen Hawking: Humans Must Colonize Space Or Risk Extinction

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says that the future of the human race depends on our going out into space.

The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday. Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference.

"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who arrived in Hong Kong to a rock star's welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture planned for Wednesday were sold out. He added that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth. "It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

The 64-year-old scientist -- author of the global best seller A Brief History of Time -- is wheelchair-bound and communicates with the help of a computer because he suffers from a neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

When someone as brilliant as Stephen Hawking says we need to go into space, we believe him. Too bad that NASA's funding has been cut so deeply that we'd be lucky to get a bottle rocket safely off the ground any time soon.

Posted on June 14, 2006
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The Littlest Dinosaurs

German scientists have discovered a species of dinosaurs that was really tiny compared to their gigantic cousins.

When you think dinosaurs, you think big. But German scientists say they've discovered a species that evolved into a dwarf, ending up only about one-third the size of its closest known relatives. The fossils were of a four-legged plant-eater that was no lap dog: It measured about 20 feet from its snout to the tip of its long tail and it weighed about a ton. But next to its close evolutionary cousin Camarasaurus, a well-known beast that stretched some 59 feet long, this guy was a runt.

What happened? The researchers say it's a case of island dwarfism, the tendency of big species to shrink over time when they find themselves on an island. It's well-known among mammals, as with fossil elephants only about 3 feet tall found in Sicily and elsewhere. Scientists think that in an environment of limited resources, smaller body size becomes an advantage, and so captive populations shrink in body size over long periods of time.

*****

Sander, who specializes in the microscopic structure of bone, got his first look at the fossils in 2003 after an amateur bone-hunter found them in a quarry. Sander and other scientists initially thought they were from juvenile animals, but details of the bone structure showed they came from adults. Eventually the scientists realized they had remains from more than 11 animals of varying ages, including at least one fully grown adult. The bone analysis also showed that Europasaurus grew more slowly than bigger dinosaurs. Its small size was a normal growth pattern for the species and not the result of disease, Sander said.

That has been a point of contention in trying to explain the so-called hobbits of Indonesia, fossil remains that have been interpreted as revealing that a dwarf species of humans lived on a remote island thousands of years ago. Mark Norell, a dinosaur expert at the American Museum of Natural History, said island dwarfism had been talked about for the hobbits and many animals, and "to find it in dinosaurs is pretty neat."

We agree, Europasaurus is pretty neat.

Posted on June 8, 2006
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Scientists Invent Robotic Tentacles

New Scientist reports that scientists have invented robotic arms called Octarms.

Robotic "tentacles" that can grasp and grapple with a wide variety of objects have been developed by US researchers.

Most robots rely on mechanical gripping jaws that have difficulty grabbing large or irregularly shaped objects. Replacing these with tentacle-like manipulators could make robots more nimble and flexible, say the scientists.

The tentacle-like manipulators, known as "Octarms", resemble an octopus's limb or an elephant's trunk. They were developed through a project called OCTOR (sOft robotiC manipulaTORs), which involves several US universities and is funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

"An elephant's trunk can pick up a peanut or a tree trunk," says Ian Walker, a member of the project team from Clemson University in South Carolina. "This ability, inherent in the OCTOR robots, gives OCTOR arms a huge advantage over conventional industrial robots."

Why do today's inventions have to look and function like the appendages of comic book supervillains? You just know one of the scientists is eventually going to strap a few of these octarms on. Do you think we are kidding? One of the scientists is already thinking about it.

"Coordinated control of multiple arms would be a real challenge," says Chris Rahn, another project member from Pennsylvania State University. But it is by no means impossible, he adds. He believes the robotic tentacles could perhaps one day be used to create a robotic octopus or even a backpack with extra limbs.

Someday a scientists is going to try Chris Rahn's backpack idea and then something will go wrong, just like with Otto Octavius' experiment, and then we will have our own flesh and blood Dr. Octopus to deal with.

Posted on May 10, 2006
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The Myths Of The Maternal Instinct

Just in time for Mother's Day, The New York Times features a horrifying article about the myth that mothers naturally care for their offspring and will fight to protect them. Taking some really gross examples from the animal world, the articles details how animal mothers routinely kill, eat and abandon their young, and why nature set things up that way.

Among several mammals, including lions, mice and monkeys, females will either spontaneously abort their fetuses or abandon their newborns when times prove rocky or a new male swaggers into town.

Other mothers, like pandas, practice a postnatal form of family planning, giving birth to what may be thought of as an heir and a spare, and then, when the heir fares well, walking away from the spare with nary a fare-thee-well. "Pandas frequently give birth to twins, but they virtually never raise two babies," said Scott Forbes, a professor of biology at the University of Winnipeg. "This is the dark side of pandas, that they have two and throw one away."

*****

Unlike humans, Dr. Hardy said, the apes never abandon or reject their young, no matter how diseased or crippled a baby may be. Yet because female chimpanzees live in troops with other nonrelated females, a ravenous, lactating mother feels little compunction about killing and eating the child of a group mate. "It's a good way to get lipids," Dr. Hrdy said. As meal plans go, cannibalism can be no-muss, no-fuss.

Nooooo! Not the pandas!! Worst. Mother's Day. Feature. Ever.

Posted on May 9, 2006
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Scientists Invent Shrug Detector

New Scientist reports that scientists have created a real-time shrug detector.

I must admit that at first I struggled to see the point of this. Some computer vision researchers at the University of Illinois have come up with a "real-time shrug detector". But after a quick chat with Huazhong Ning, one of the researchers behind the project, I'm less sceptical. "When we communicate with other people we watch their body movements to help us understand," he told me. "Shrugging is a relatively easy one to detect, while others like blinking, hand movements and facial expressions are a lot harder. So we started with shrugging."

The detector tracks the movement of a person's face and shoulders and tries to spot "relative fast movement of the shoulder toward the face". That's a shrug to you and me. As you can see from this picture, even trying to hide behind a piece of paper won't foil it.

You can shrug but you can't hide. Or can you? Close inspection of the six page PDF document explaining the scientific principles and formulas behind the shrug detector reveals that the shrug detector will fail in some situations.

The system could fail in some special situations. It does not work when the face detector fails since the shrugging frame classifier depends on the result from face detector (e.g. in Figure.6 the face turns in large to one side). Fortunately our face detector detects almost all faces with yaw rotation angle within [¡60o; 60o]. A reasonable solution to this problem is to embedded a robust head tracker into this system. Also the system maybe generate false alarms when the subject drops or forwards head (Figure 7 is an example). In this case the false alarm is caused because the ct of TP approaches that of a real shrug while the ct of SP is not stabilized yet. The system will recover from this failure after several frames if the subject keeps this pose because 1) the classifier utilizes a decreasing threshold (see Eqn.2); 2) ct of TP will stabilize after some time.

The other problem with detecting shrugs (according to the PDF) is that people shrug differently. Some people make obvious shrugs while other people make very subtle shrugs that are hard to detect.

The first issue is "what is shrug"? The definition is usually qualitative rather than quantitative. Usually shrug means raising the shoulders but there is no objective definition of the time length and height of the action. The more ambiguous situation is that some people may shrug by just opening their arms with little or no movement of the shoulders.

We were going to purchase a shrug detector for the office but what good is a shrug detector that fails in special situations or generates false alarms? And can it make coffee? Because if it can make good coffee then that might make up for a little imperfection in its shrug detecting abilities.

Posted on May 1, 2006
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Harvard Telescope To Look For Extraterrestrials

Harvard University has embarked on a very interesting project: looking for aliens. A powerful new telescope was designed to capture possible light signals transmitted to Earth by extraterrestrials.

The telescope is the first to be developed solely to search the skies for light pulses from aliens and will be able to cover 100,000 times the amount of sky covered by current equipment, its developers said. "The opening of this telescope represents one of those rare moments in a field of scientific endeavor when a great leap forward is enabled," said Bruce Betts, project director at The Planetary Society, a group in Pasadena, California, that advocates space exploration and funded the telescope's development.

"Sending laser signals across the cosmos would be a very logical way for E.T. to reach out, but until now, we have been ill-equipped to receive any such signal," he said. Researchers say alien civilizations may be as likely to use light signals to communicate as radio transmissions. Visible light can form tight beams and could potentially convey information more efficiently, Betts said.

The telescope was built at Harvard University's Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics' Oak Ridge Observatory, where the nonprofit Planetary Society has searched the depth of space for alien life using an 84-foot radio telescope. The new telescope, located at the observatory at Harvard, Massachusetts, a town about 30 miles northwest of Boston, will vastly enhance the scope of the search for artificial light pulses, Betts said. The telescope can process the equivalent of all books in print every second. As it scans the sky it uses a type of camera that can detect a billionth-of-a-second flash of light. "We are going from looking at a few stars a night to an all-sky survey where over a year we will search the entire northern hemisphere," Betts said.

The telescope cost about $400,000 to build, much cheaper than a typical research-quality telescope. Betts said that was partly because the telescope does not need to be as sensitive, and "they've done it on a shoestring budget by being clever."

But will they tell the public if they actually find something? Or will the Men in Black just hush it all up, as usual?

Posted on April 18, 2006
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The Deep Sea Volcano And Its Moat of Death

The National Geographic reports on the discovery of a giant deep-sea volcano which has its very own Moat of Death, which has to go down as the coolest scientific discovery in quite awhile.

Beneath the waves of the South Pacific lies a volcanic realm nearly as strange as that featured in TV's hit drama Lost. But instead of a mysterious island, scientists have found a bubbling submarine volcano whose weird features include a swirling vortex, a host of strange animals, and a fearsome zone of toxic waters dubbed the Moat of Death.

The volcano, described in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sits within the crater of a gigantic underwater mountain rising more than 4,500 meters (15,000 feet) from the ocean floor near the island of Samoa. The seamount, called Vailulu'u, is an active volcano, with a 2-mile-wide (3.2-kilometer-wide) crater. The cone rising within it has been dubbed Nafanua, for the Samoan goddess of war.

Five years ago Hubert Staudigel of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues mapped the mountain using remote-sensing techniques. When they returned to the site in 2005 for a more thorough study with submersible vehicles, the scientists found that the seamount had grown a new, 300-meter (1,000-foot) lava cone, a sign of renewed volcanic activity. The peak of the cone, 700 meters (2,300 feet) below sea level, turned out to be teeming with life. "It was just full of eels," Staudigel said. "When we sent the submersible down, we found hundreds of eels scurrying out of the rock. Normally you'd see one or two." "That's very spectacular," he continued, "because there's not much food at that depth. You wonder what the eels live off of." At first the scientists thought the eels were eating microbes that lived near the cone's volcanic vents. But when some of the eels were caught, their stomachs turned out to be full of shrimp. The moat lies between Vailulu'u's encircling crater and the rim of the cone inside it. It's an extremely toxic environment, Staudigel said, where oxygen levels are dangerously low and volcanic vents fill the water with iron soot "almost like underwater smog."

The volcano is also spewing liquid carbon dioxide, which combines with seawater to make a deadly acidic mix. And the same currents that bring shrimp to the eels also bring fish into the toxic moat, trapping them. The result? "We find one fish carcass after another," Staudigel said. But one species survives within the moat, a type of sea worm that seems to be feeding on the animal carcasses. It's not clear how the worms manage to live in a region where nothing but bacteria can live.

Worms that live in the Moat of Death. So. Incredibly. Cool.

Posted on April 17, 2006
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Hot New Designer Sunglasses For the Insect in Your Life

At least the scientists in Germany are working on something important: this photo entered into a German science-photo competition showcases the latest in designer wear for your pet housefly.

The photo shows a fly wearing his hot new designer lesnes, which were specially cut using a laser in order to fit the fly's 0.08-inch-wide (2-millimeter-wide) head.

Manufacturing firm Micreon GmbH submitted the insect's picture for the Bilder der Forschung (Photos of Science) 2005 competition. Selected images were on display last week in a Munich shopping center.

Micreon, based in Hannover, Germany, created the fly's eyewear using ultrafast laser micro-machining. The firm notes on its Web site that the process can create objects with high precision at scales of less than a thousandth of a millimeter.

We'd planned to order one hundred pairs for our favorite houseflies, but Accounting put a stop to it pronto. Killjoys.

Posted on March 31, 2006
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U.S. Training Sharks to Be Underwater Spies

The BBC reports that the U.S. is planning on training sharks to conduct underwater surveillance. The scientists plan on controlling the sharks by implanting electrodes in their brains.

It says the aim is "to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails". The unusual project was unveiled last week in Hawaii, it says. The research is being funded by the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), according to the magazine.

Remote-controlled sharks do have advantages that robotic underwater surveillance vehicles just cannot match: they are silent, and they power themselves. It aims to build on latest developments in brain implant technology which has already seen scientists controlling the movements of fish, rats and monkeys. "Neural implants consists of a series of electrodes that are embedded into the animal's brain, which can then be used to stimulate various functional areas," the magazine says.

It says such devices are already being used by scientists at Boston University to "steer" a spiny dogfish in a fish tank. The next step for the Pentagon scientists will be the release of blue sharks with similar devices into the ocean off the coast of Florida. As radio signals will not penetrate the sea, communications with the animals will be made by sonar. The US navy has acoustic signalling towers capable of sending sonar signals to a shark up to 300km (187 miles) away, the magazine says. It says the scientists will be particularly interested in the animals' health during the tests. "As wild predators, it is very easy to exhaust them, and this will place strict limits on how long the researchers can control their movements in any one session without harming them. "Despite this limitation, though, remote-controlled sharks do have advantages that robotic underwater surveillance vehicles just cannot match: they are silent, and they power themselves," the magazine says.

This reminds us of that movie called Deep Blue Sea, in which a bunch of stupid scientists put electrodes into some sharks' brains and did some other things to them. They thought they could control the sharks. They were wrong.

Posted on March 2, 2006
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Killer Goo Attacks Los Angeles

Apparently Los Angeles is being attacked by some sort of black, tarry killer goo.

Los Angeles officials were still scratching their heads today over what caused a mysterious black goo to burble from streets downtown, forcing the evacuation hundreds of apartment dwellers. A Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman said investigators had yet to identify the "black tarry substance" more than 24 hours after it erupted at Olive Street and Pico Boulevard.

*****

About 200 residents were forced to flee as a hazardous materials team and dozens of firefighters worked throughout the day to identify what was first deemed "a black tarry substance" and later morphed into a "watery mud."

*****

Firefighters were alerted at 3 a.m. by complaints of a sewer-like smell at an apartment house at 1220 S. Olive St. near Pico Boulevard, but found nothing. They returned at 1 p.m. to find a Slimer-like ooze lurking beneath central Los Angeles. "We were called back because there was a gooey substance, a tarry-type substance, coming out the underground electrical vaults, out of manhole covers in the street, through the sidewalks and possibly in one older apartment building," Myers said.

A 120-foot stretch of Olive buckled 1 1/2 feet, he said. The pre-1933 unreinforced masonry apartment building shifted one foot from its foundation. Sidewalks were as hot as Jacuzzis. And a pressurized liquid shot from every street orifice located above what used to be a historic oil field downtown. No one was injured in what amounted to a black lagoon. Hazmat and Urban Search and Rescue crews determined that the mysterious substance wasn't flammable, Myers said. "Incident commanders are evaluating some form of drilling operation one or two blocks away as the possible cause," he added.

Well, was it from the drilling operation or is it the black tar aliens from The X-Files that you could see in people's eyes? Because the black tar aliens are actually kind of cool -- so long as they don't take us over, of course.

Posted on February 22, 2006
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Emotion-Sensing Computer Feels Your Pain

The Discovery Channel reports that scientists are working on a computer that uses emotion-sensing technology to notice when you are feeling frustrated. The computer can then respond with soothing music or apologies.

Wouldn't it be great if your computer could recognize when you're frustrated with it and adjust itself to calm you down? Emotion-sensing technology could someday allow a computer to do just that.

Computer scientist Christian Peter of the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics in Rostock, Germany, and his colleagues are working on a system that collects data about a person's emotional state using sight, sound and touch technology.

The system then interprets the information and reacts accordingly.

For example, if a computer senses that its user is agitated, it might tone down the background color of the screen, turn down background music, enlarge or reduce graphics, adjust the flow of information being presented to the user or simply apologize.

Imagine you've been slaving away for hours on an important report for work when suddenly the computer crashes. You reboot and panickly search for the report but can't find it anywhere. The computer realizes that you are angry and frustrated so it turns on some calm music and says, "I'm so sorry." Will that really make you feel any better?

Posted on February 16, 2006
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Scientists Discover the All-Important Earwax Gene

It's the scientific breakthrough we've all been waiting for: Japanese scientists have finally found the gene that determines what kind of earwax you get. And it's about time.

Earwax comes in two types, wet and dry. The wet form predominates in Africa and Europe, where 97 percent or more of people have it, and the dry form among East Asians. The populations of South and Central Asia are roughly half and half. By comparing the DNA of Japanese with each type, the researchers were able to identify the gene that controls which type a person has, they report in today's issue of Nature Genetics.

They then found that the switch of a single DNA unit in the gene determines whether a person has wet or dry earwax. The gene's role seems to be to export substances out of the cells that secrete earwax. The single DNA change deactivates the gene and, without its contribution, a person has dry earwax.

The Japanese researchers, led by Kohichiro Yoshiura of Nagasaki University, then studied the gene in 33 ethnic groups around the world. Since the wet form is so common in Africa and in Europe, this was likely to have been the ancestral form before modern humans left Africa 50,000 years ago.

The dry form, the researchers say, presumably arose later in northern Asia, because they detected it almost universally in their tests of northern Han Chinese and Koreans. The dry form becomes less common in southern Asia, probably because the northerners with the dry earwax gene intermarried with southern Asians carrying the default wet earwax gene. The dry form is quite common in Native Americans, confirming other genetic evidence that their ancestors migrated across the Bering Strait from Siberia 15,000 years ago.

*****

But earwax seems to have the very humble role of being no more than biological flypaper, preventing dust and insects from entering the ear. Since it seems unlikely that having wet or dry earwax could have made much difference to an individual's fitness, the earwax gene may have some other, more important function. Dr. Yoshiura and his colleagues suggest that the gene would have been favored because of its role in sweating.

The report goes on to describe its findings about armpit odor and its correlation to earwax, but by that time we were so grossed out we had to stop reading.

Posted on February 1, 2006
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The Facism of Blue Sky Thinking

Have you ever heard of the Blue Sky Appreciation Society? It's mission is to counter the facism of blue-sky thinking. The site has pictures of beautiful and unusual cloud formations. It also features a cloud of the month and clouds that look like things, like this amazing blue zombie cloud shot by Graeme Ferris in Wollongong, NSW, Australia.

"Clouds are for dreamers, and their contemplation benefits the soul," www.cloudappreciationsociety.com says on its homepage. Yahoo!, the search engine, nominated the Cloud Appreciation Society site after finding that at one point last year it was receiving seven million visits a month. It takes a poetic, aesthetic view of clouds rather than a meteorological one, and quotes John Ruskin on the sky: "Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity."

The society’s manifesto says it was "founded on the belief that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them". Gavin Pretor-Pinney founded the society last January and runs it from his home in West London. He has 1,800 paid-up members in 26 countries; for a joining fee of only £1.70 they receive a lapel badge and a certificate to frame and hang on the wall.

"It all started when I gave a talk at a literary festival about clouds, and thought it would be a good idea to start a cloud society. A few months later I put up the website to get an international audience, because it was the cheapest and easiest way of doing things, and it has grown from that." Mr Pretor-Pinney, 37, co-founder of The Idler magazine, yesterday explained his enthusiasm for another form of idling. "I loved to look at clouds when I was young, and like all children saw pictures, shapes and faces in them. It seemed to me a pity that you lose that sense of wonder when you grow up." He regards clouds as nature’s poetry and is writing a book about them. "It’s hard to match their variety and drama, particularly in Britain where we have a constantly changing cloudscape. Too many people think that perfect weather is a cloudless blue sky, but good weather and cloudy weather are not necessarily in opposition to each other."

Among the clouds on the site is Morning Glory, a meteorological phenomenon 600 miles long that rolls in from the sea to the coast of Queensland at certain times of the year. Glider pilots like to fly on top of it as though surfing a wave.The clouds of the month section includes a stunning halo caused by ice crystals in cirrostratus, waterspout funnels touching down from cumulonimbus, streaks of rain or ice tumbling from clouds but never reaching the ground, blood-red altostratus at sunset and puffy little cumulus on a summer day.

This is of crucial importance -- stop what you're doing immediately and walk outside. Now, which of those clouds looks like Napoleon Dynamite? Your boss will understand. Now, shout it out with us: "Death to the fascism of blue-sky thinking!"

Posted on January 30, 2006
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Scientists Create Glow in the Dark Pigs

Those fun-loving Taiwanese scientists are at it again: they've created glow in the dark pigs.

They claim that while other researchers have bred partly fluorescent pigs, theirs are the only pigs in the world which are green through and through. The pigs are transgenic, created by adding genetic material from jellyfish into a normal pig embryo. The researchers hope the pigs will boost the island's stem cell research, as well as helping with the study of human disease.

The scientists, from National Taiwan University's Department of Animal Science and Technology, say that although the pigs glow, they are otherwise no different from any others. Taiwan is not claiming a world first. Others have bred partially fluorescent pigs before; but the researchers insist the three pigs they have produced are better.

*****

To create them, DNA from jellyfish was added to about 265 pig embryos which were implanted in eight different sows. Four of the female pigs became pregnant and three male piglets were born three months ago.

In daylight, the researchers say the pigs' eyes, teeth and trotters look green. Their skin has a greenish tinge. In the dark, shine a blue light on them and they glow torch-light bright. The scientists will use the transgenic pigs to study human disease. Because the pig's genetic material encodes a protein that shows up as green, it is easy to spot. So if, for instance, some of its stem cells are injected into another animal, scientists can track how they develop without the need for a biopsy or invasive test.

You know that it's just a matter of time before one of these scientists goes all Jeckyll and Hyde on us and injects himself with the jellyfish DNA.

Posted on January 19, 2006
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Surf's Up in California: Way Up

For Christmas, Californias has been hit with some monster waves.

Forget "King Kong." Monster waves storming ashore from Santa Barbara to San Diego are the really big show on the West coast, CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker reports. The endless rush of eight to 15-foot waves yesterday drew crowds that could rival any movie theatre. They are dazzling, and dangerous.

"We've made rescues up and down the coastline here in Los Angeles County," lifeguard Garth Canning says. "Again, we have to tell everyone not just 'don't go in the water,' 'watch out even coming close to the edge of the ocean.'" Despite the warnings, bigger than normal waves and warmer than normal temperatures are proving irresistible to daredevil surfers, even though one surfer drowned.

"Days like that just make you really humble," a surfer says. "At the end of the day you just kind of nurse your wounds." Surfers may be the stars of this show. But the producer? A powerful winter storm about 1000 miles out there in the Pacific. By time the waves reach shore, they're packing a punch, washing over breaks, even tearing a chunk out of the Venice Beach pier. This is what you call pier pressure. The surf is more subdued today, but it's expected to reach spectacular heights again this weekend, which has surfers saying, 'Just try to beat this Christmas rush.'

Awesome, dude.

Posted on December 23, 2005
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Mona Lisa Smile is 83% Happy

Computer imaging has now solved the mystery of the Mona Lisa's smile.

The smile of the Mona Lisa may seem enigmatic because she is, in fact, a blend of many different emotions. A computer analysis of the Renaissance masterpiece has found that she is 83 per cent happy, 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful and 2 per cent angry.

Leonardo Da Vinci's most famous portrait has been scrutinised by a software programme or algorithm designed to tease apart the different emotions behind a facial expression. The result is that the smile of the Mona Lisa is broken down into its constituent parts, said Nicu Sebe of the University of Amsterdam.

*****

According to New Scientist magazine: "His algorithm examines facial features such as curvature of the lips and crinkles around the eyes, then scores each face with respect to six basic emotions." Dr Sebe said he drew on a database of young female faces to derive an average or "neutral" expression which he used to compare the work against.

Although the overwhelming emotion was one of happiness, the computer found that the second most important was disgust, which could explain why the Mona Lisa may seem to some people to be expressing a sense of irony, said Dr Sebe. "But no one really knows for sure why she looks so enigmatic. We don't know the context of why she was smiling, so it will remain ambiguous," he said.

We thought they said they solved it -- so why will it "remain ambiguous"? Is this some kind of scientific prank or something?

Posted on December 16, 2005
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More Bad News For the Depressed and Anxious

In the "life is not fair" category: a new study shows that geeky men who have social anxiety are more likely to die of a heart attack. The study seemingly proves that men who are lonely, depressed and avoid social interaction are more likely to have a heart attack -- and presumably die alone, totally miserable.

Men who avoid social interaction -- not bothering to say hello or even discuss the day's activities with friends or co-workers -- face an increased risk of death from heart disease.

"Social avoidance was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular death independent of the men's baseline heart risk factors," Jarett Berry, MD, of Northwestern University, Chicago, told those attending the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions.

When men who scored high on a social-avoidance scale were compared with men who clearly were more socially involved with co-workers and friends, the researchers found that men with social avoidance were 38% more likely to die from cardiovascular disease.

A 30-year study on 1,947 healthy men found that social avoidance was associated with age-adjusted increases in cardiovascular and heart disease deaths.

So presumably, that really obnoxious loud guy who's always hitting on the secretaries, telling bad jokes and slapping everyone on the back is going to live forever. That's your uplifting news for the day.

Posted on December 7, 2005
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Scientists Testing Cyber Hugs on Chickens

Someday you may be able to add "hug a chicken" to the list of things you can do with a computer and an Internet connection. Singapore scientists are busy working on vibration jackets for the chickens which is the logical first step toward actual chicken cyber hugs.

Singapore scientists looking for ways to transmit the sense of touch over the Internet have devised a vibration jacket for chickens and are thinking about electronic children's pyjamas for cyberspace hugs.

A wireless jacket for chickens or other pets can be controlled with a computer and gives the animal the feeling of being touched by its owner, researchers at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) told Monday's edition of The Straits Times.

The next step would be to use the same concept to transmit hugs over the Internet, it said.

Do chickens even like hugs? Eventually human cyber hugs will be possible as long as you are wearing your human vibration jacket.

Posted on November 29, 2005
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Lewis Black Visits the Weather Channel

Now there's something you don't see every day: Daily Show comedian Lewis Black visited The Weather Channel, to discuss his views about the weather.In one segment Black had a heated discussion with The Weather Channel's Dave Schwartz in which Black informed Schwartz that meteorologists have the easiest job in the world -- and that if he had known how easy it was, he would have gone to weather school instead of theater school. Black also had several discussions about global warming (which he says is a serious, real problem) and even tried his hand at forecasting by reading the big weather maps.

You can see the (very funny) clips of Lewis' visit to The Weather Channel here.

Posted on November 11, 2005
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Archeologists Find 4,000 Year Old Noodles

You know we're a sucker for a good noodle story, so this one about scientists digging up 4,000 year old noodles was bound to catch our eye.

It was a long time to wait for a portion of noodles. Scientists have uncovered the world's oldest known noodles, dating back 4,000 years, at an archaeological site, Lajia, along the upper reaches of the Yellow river in north-west China. They were preserved in an upturned bowl among the debris of a gigantic earthquake. Until now, the earliest evidence for noodles has been a Chinese written description of noodle preparation dating back 1,900 years. The Lajia settlement is thought to have been destroyed by earthquake and catastrophic floods. Houyuan Lu and his team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing were excavating this scene of ancient destruction when they came across a well preserved earthenware bowl, embedded upside-down in a layer of clay. In the bowl they were amazed to see the remains of somebody's dinner. "The prehistoric noodles were on top of the sediment cone that once filled the inside of the inverted bowl. Thin, delicate and yellow, they resembled the traditional La-Mian noodle that is made by repeatedly pulling and stretching the dough by hand," said Dr Lu.

An empty space between the sediment and the bottom of the bowl had prevented the soft noodles from being crushed and helped preserve them. "The empty space must have been tightly sealed and become anoxic, allowing excellent preservation of the noodles for 4,000 years," said Dr Lu. When the bowl was lifted the exposure to air quickly oxidised the noodles, turning them to dust, but Dr Lu and his colleagues still managed to analyse the remains.

By analysing phytoliths, the microscopic mineral particles that form within plants, and starch grains from the noodle powder, the scientists managed to narrow down what kind of flour the noodles were made from. Modern noodles tend to be made from wheat flour, but analysis of the ancient noodles revealed they were made from millet, used in making alcoholic drinks. "Our findings support the belief that early plant domestication and food production relied on millet in the semi-arid Loess plateau region of China," writes Dr Lu in Nature today.

Dr. Lu and his colleagues are hot on the trail of the 4,000 year-old recipe, and are analyzing some bone fragments and an oily substance found in the bowl. They hope to reverse engineer the recipe and tell us what they ate with their noodles 4,000 years ago. Awesome.

Posted on October 18, 2005
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Ig Nobel Prizes Awarded

The winners of the 2005 Ig Nobel Prizes have been announced. A BBC news story about the Ig Nobels says these awards are spoofs of the Nobel Prizes that are awarded for "achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced." The BBC also says the four actual Nobel Prize winners gave this year's Ig Nobel awards. Here is a list of this year's winners.

Agricultural History: James Watson of Massey University, New Zealand, for his scholarly study, "The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley's Exploding Trousers."

Physics: Awarded to the very patient John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for their experiment that began in the year 1927. In the experiment, a glob of congealed black tar has been very slowly dripping through a funnel at the rate of approximately one drop every nine years.

Medicine: Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing Neuticles -- artificial replacement testicles for dogs.

Literature: Award to the Nigerian email writers for creating "a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters -- General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others -- each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them."

Peace: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while the locust was watching selected scenes from Star Wars.

Economics: Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that "runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday."

Chemistry: Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin, for conducting an experiment to determine whether people swim faster in syrup or in water.

Biology: Awarded to a group of scientists for smelling and cataloging the odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed.

Nutrition: Awarded to Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats of Tokyo, Japan, for analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (and counting).

Fluid Dynamics: Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow and Jozsef Gal for calculating the pressure that builds up inside a penguin. For more information see their report: "Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation." (PDF Link)

So, there you have it. This year's Ig Nobel winners. The phsyics experiment sure sounds exciting but we don't think we will try and replicate it anytime soon.

Posted on October 9, 2005
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The Hurricane's Aftermath

Watching the news coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has been a disturbing experience. The human suffering is just overwhelming. Our sister site, BloggersBlog.com has an entire section devoted to Hurricane Katrina here. The section has links to blogs covering the hurricane aftermath, local news with hourly updates, links to legitimate charities for those who'd like to help, and lots of news coverage.

Our thoughts and prayers are with all those are have suffered and are still suffering during this national disaster.

Posted on September 2, 2005
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The Jerk-O-Meter is Live

The researchers at MIT are at it again: this time, they've developed a Jerk-O-Meter which measures the attentiveness of whoever you're talking to on the phone.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing software for cell phones that would analyze speech patterns and voice tones to rate people — on a scale of 0 to 100% — on how engaged they are in a conversation.

Anmol Madan, who led the project while he pursued a master's degree at MIT, sees the Jerk-O-Meter as a tool for improving relationships, not ending them. Or it might assist telephone sales and marketing efforts. "Think of a situation where you could actually prevent an argument," he said. "Just having this device can make people more attentive because they know they're being monitored."

The program, which Madan said is nearing completion, uses mathematical algorithms to measure levels of stress and empathy in a person's voice. It also keeps track of how often someone is speaking.

"It's an academically proven thing," Madan said of the math behind those measurements. "There are a bunch of academic papers published about this."

For now, the Jerk-O-Meter is set up to monitor the user's end of the conversation. If his attention is straying, a message pops up on the phone that warns, "Don't be a jerk!" or "Be a little nicer now." A score closer to 100% would prompt, "Wow, you're a smooth talker."

However, the Jerk-O-Meter also could be set up to test the voice on the other end of the line. Then it could send the tester such reports as: "This person is acting like a jerk. Do you want to hang up?"

It would probably be terribly unkind of us to point out that socially adept people don't actually need algorithms to tell them when someone is being a jerk. And besides, we love a good argument.

Posted on August 24, 2005
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The New Tinkle-Powered Battery

Now that's what we call thinking outside the box. Those crafty Singapore scientists are at it again with the new inventions. They've now developed a paper battery that is powered by urine. Pee. Tinkle. Yes, tinkle sounds much better, so let's go with that.

Research investment into developing smaller and cheaper chips to process information in disposable health tests has been significant, but they were still reliant on an external power source. The researchers at Singapore’s Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) think they have overcome this problem.

The battery is composed of paper, soaked in copper chloride, sandwiched between layers of magnesium and copper. The whole thing, once laminated in plastic, is just a millimetre thick, and 6cm by 3cm in size....

Dr. Ki Bang Lee, lead researcher, sees a big market for the battery. He argues that it could easily be integrated into biochip systems for "healthcare diagnostic applications", making it much easier for people to manage their own healthcare, only going to the doctor when absolutely necessary.

Dr. Ki Bang Lee has not explained how this breakthrough discovery in battery power can be used for recharging something like, say, one's cell phone. In fact, the very concept is mind-boggling.

Posted on August 16, 2005
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Scientists Achieve Breakthrough in Cockroach Wars

Scientists have achieved an amazing breakthrough in the ongoing War on Cockroaches. In a startling new development, scientists announced that they have managed to infiltrate the main base of the enemy. They did this by creating Insbot, a complex robot that fools the cockroaches into following it by mimicking cockroach behaviors and secreting chemicals that attract roaches. The cockroaches even followed the Insbot into the light where humans could easily step on them.

Developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Insbot has learned how to mimic cockroaches' behaviour and interact with a colony of the insects. The device was developed to show how artificial systems could interact with animals in future mixed societies, Gilles Caprari and colleagues report in the latest edition of IEEE Robotics and Automation (vol 12, p 58).

In addition to a host of touch sensors that allow it to interact with the roaches, Insbot can secrete chemicals that mimic the pheromones with which they