Reseize, the other newslog.

Who is what? What is where? Where am I? Are you there?

You have hit the other collection, a newslog designed for the curious.

Netvibes

Writely

Bubbleshare

CalendarHub

Rallypoint

MyLinkVault bookmarking service

YubNub

Techcrunch Blog

The best Web 2.0 software

Ajax by Joel Parish

The grand old dame of social tags ;-)

another bid on social bookmarking

Terminator Ted at Garageband

Coralie at Garageband

Web Of Trust auch auf Deutsch

The Minstrel web of trust

Thawte Web Of Trust

10 Punkte Web Of Trust Notar

Blogarama

Saturday, March 18, 2006

First Split Second Of The Universe

Scientists peering back to the oldest light in the universe have evidence to support the concept of inflation, which poses that the universe expanded many trillion times its size faster than a snap of the fingers at the outset of the big bang. We're talking about when the universe was less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. In that crucial split second, changes occurred that allowed for the creation of stars and galaxies hundreds of millions of years later. The new finding was made with NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and is based on three years of continuous observations of the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow light from the first moments of the universe. It's admittedly mind-boggling. Inflation poses that the universe expanded far faster than the speed of light and grew from a subatomic size to a golf-ball size almost instantaneously. This concept, however, was a mere product of calculations done with pencil and paper around 1980. The idea stands on much firmer ground today. "Inflation was an amazing concept when it was first proposed 25 years ago, and now we can support it with real observations," said WMAP team member Dr. Gary Hinshaw of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., a lead author on one of the scientific papers submitted for publication. Read more...
Image to right: Time Line of the Universe -- The expansion of the universe over most of it's history has been relatively gradual. The notion that a rapid period "inflation" preceded the Big Bang expansion was first put forth 25 years ago. The new WMAP observations favor specific inflation scenarios over other long held ideas. Click image to enlarge. Credit: NASA
This was seized 4 u at NASA

330 MPG! Aptera Hybrid Promises Amazing Mileage for Less Than $20,000

CARLSBAD, Calif. — Accelerated Composites LLC, a small startup company here, said it is developing the Aptera, a two-seat hybrid passenger car delivering 330 mpg at a steady 65 miles per hour — at a price under $20,000.
The company said the car, which may be ready for production in two years, will have acceleration and handling similar to that of the Honda Insight hybrid. The first Aptera prototype may be ready by March.
The prototype under construction will be powered by a single-cylinder, 12-horsepower diesel engine and a 24-horsepower DC electric motor, and will have a continuously variable transmission. Power is delivered through a single rear wheel mounted on a composite swing arm. The car is expected to have an electronically limited top speed of 95 miles per hour and an estimated 0-to-60-mph acceleration of 11 seconds.
The company says the key to the efficiency of the three-wheeler is an aerodynamic body wrapped around a flat-panel composite structure. The company has developed a composite construction technique that significantly lowers costs.
What this means to you: Toyota isn't the only one working hard on hybrids. The smallest startups have their own ideas, too.

This was seized 4 u at edmunds.com

Popular Science Goes To Hollywood!

PopSci's Movie Awards: The Good, the Bad and the Highly Implausible Sure, the Oscars made for juicy Sunday-night entertainment—but where, amid the glittering gowns and flash bulbs, were the geeks? Here's our rundown of the honors the Academy forgot to hand out... By Gregory Mone
Read more...

This was seized 4 u at Popular Science

Roomba Cockfight

Goddamn, who doesn't love a robotic vacuum cleaner cockfight? I know they're illegal in most states, but luckily California isn't one of them. Sure, there are liberals who say it's abuse to whip a Roomba into a frenzy, tape a pair of sharp scissors on its back and set it loose in the ring. But screw those bleeding hearts. Roombas, the saucer-shaped, floor-sweeping robots from iRobot, love to fight. It's in their nature. Read more from Annalee Newitz...

This was seized 4 u at Alternet

Friday, March 17, 2006

Small, smaller, smallest - research towards the construction of nanomotors

Nanotechnology is one of the most important technologies of the future. This field embraces research, handling, and production of objects and structures in the size range below 100 nanometres (a nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre), the boundary where living and non-living Nature meet. It thus includes the development of biological "working parts", as a prerequisite for their technological application. A promising interdisciplinary approach combines research methods of biology, physics, chemistry, computing, system theory and engineering into a "synthetic biology".
The EU has also recognised this, and has started up the NEST (New and Emerging Science and Technology) programme - an initiative aimed at supporting unconventional and visionary research in this field. An international consortium, co-ordinated by Prof. Helmut Grubmüller, has now been awarded funding for a research plan to pioneer the tailored development and production of artificial systems according to the blueprints of biological functional units. Their ambitious project NANOMOT aims at developing nanomotors, and at joining up them and their components in a system resembling a construction kit.
The idea of a nanomotor of this kind is based upon biological machines such as the "tail" (flagellum) of certain gut bacteria, which is driven by a flagellar motor and thus propels the bacterium forwards. A motor complex converts electrical energy from ATP (adenosine triphosphate), a molecular energy store, into a rotational movement of the flagellum, which is fixed to an "axle". Another example is the "packaging" of DNA (the substance in which genetic information is stored) into viral coats by a biological nanomotor with a rotating axis.
Nano-components of this kind are expected to be applied in the production of DNA, protein and antibody chips as miniaturised platforms for use in molecular-biological and molecular-medical tests and in targeted medicines with fewer side effects.

This was seized 4 u at Max Planck Society

'Averageness' the key to greatness (or the story about Eclipse)

The 18th Century horse Eclipse was a legendary figure in horse racing, contributing to the bloodlines of 80% of modern thoroughbreds. Yet, despite his unbeaten record, Eclipse, the "father of modern racehorses" was perfectly average in the leg department. That is the verdict of scientists at the Royal Veterinary College (RVC), who have reconstructed one of the horse's legs to look at what made him a winner. It appears that Eclipse's body shape and movement were in the middle of the normal range, giving him the perfect confirmation for running. "To be average is good from the point of view of a racehorse," Dr Alan Wilson of the RVC told the BBC News website. "From the point of view of his bones, he's right in the middle of what would prove typical for a racehorse."
Eclipse was born in 1764, the year of a solar eclipse. He easily outclassed other racehorses, winning 18 races before being retired to stud, chiefly because nobody wanted to pit their horses against him. He sired three Derby winners and found his way into the bloodlines of a great many modern thoroughbreds. The horse was dissected after his death and his skeleton has been on show for many years at the National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket. Dr Wilson and graduate student Renate Weller used the skeleton to try to work out the secret of his success. Using portraits of Eclipse and contemporary accounts of the horse running, they reconstructed one of his legs and compared it with the shape and structure of modern horses. They then analysed his skeleton and developed computer models of horse movement. They found that Eclipse was perfectly average when it came to the shape and morphology of his leg bones. It appears that hundreds of years of modern breeding have hardly changed the "recipe" for a winning racehorse.
Dr Wilson said it was fascinating to use old skeletons as a reservoir of information to see how perceptions have changed over the years for how people think a racehorse should look. "If you look at a Stubbs painting, it doesn't look much like a modern racehorse," he said. "But it's our perception that's changed and not the horses." Old paintings might not provide an accurate record, he said, because they were painted to impress the owner and probably exaggerated certain features of the horse.
So, if Eclipse's bone structure was not exceptional, what made him the winner he was?
His large heart and powerful lungs - seen at dissection - would have played a role. Another attribute that gave certain horses an edge over the opposition was their "spirit" or "will to win", said Dr Wilson. Further answers may lie with planned DNA studies of Eclipse. Scientists hope to extract DNA from the animal's bones, hooves and teeth to look at his genetic recipe. Until then, racing enthusiasts may have to rely on the old skills of weighing up a horse's form and fitness. But this latest study does show, perhaps, that there is an element of truth to the old adage that some punters can pick a winner simply by looking at a horse.

This was written by Helen Briggs & seized 4 u at BBC

Jam with friends all over the World

eJamming, which launched v.1.0 today, allows musicians located anywhere to get together for jam sessions. Your drummer’s in New York, lead guitar is in India, your bass player is somewhere else, and you’re on keyboard. No problem. eJamming lets you jam anyway. And you can talk to the other musicians via a VOIP feature.
All you need is digital instrument (midi enabled) and an internet connected computer. Download the client (Mac or PC), and either get the old band back together virtually or find a musician on the service. See the demo here.
eJamming has a one week free trial and it’s $20 a month after that. Price plans are here.The only instrument I ever played was a Recorder in 4th grade..so if anyone with musical skills tries it out, please ping me with your review. I’m particularly interesting in how eJamming handles latency issues. They discuss the issue here and say “eJamming’s patented algorithms delay the sounding of your instrument until you receive music data from your fellow eJammers.” They go on:
Musicians accommodate their playing to other musicians all the time, ever-so-slightly altering their attack in different situations. The players who’ve been testing eJamming — including the most proficient and skeptical we could find — have accommodated very quickly to these instrument-feel delays (surprisingly quickly), and many have found they can even deal with the 50-90mS delays when collaborating from the East Coast of the US to Eastern Europe.

This was written by Michael Arlington & seized 4 u at TechCrunch

Thursday, March 16, 2006

DNA Art - Origami Goes Nano

The software of life has now been woven into smiley faces, snowflakes and stars. Caltech researcher Paul Rothemund calls his new technique "DNA origami," and he can weave any two-dimensional shape or pattern using DNA molecules. The technology could one day be used to construct tiny chemical factories or molecular electronics by attaching proteins and inorganic components to DNA circuit boards. The research is detailed in the March 16 issue of the journal Nature. Read more...

This was written by Ker Than & seized 4 u at LifeScience

Cosmic 'DNA'

Magnetic forces at the center of the galaxy have twisted a nebula into the shape of DNA, a new study reveals. The double helix shape is commonly seen inside living organisms, but this is the first time it has been observed in the cosmos. "Nobody has ever seen anything like that before in the cosmic realm," said the study's lead author Mark Morris of UCLA. "Most nebulae are either spiral galaxies full of stars or formless amorphous conglomerations of dust and gas—space weather. What we see indicates a high degree of order." The DNA nebula is about 80 light-years long. It's about 300 light-years from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The nebula is nearly perpendicular to the black hole, moving out of the galaxy at a quick clip—about 620 miles per second (1,000 kilometers per second). Magnetic field lines at the galactic center are about 1,000 times stronger than on Earth. They run perpendicular to the black hole, but parallel through the nebula. Scientists think that twisting of these lines is what causes the double helix shape. While the black hole might be the first culprit to come to mind, it's more likely that the magnetic field lines are anchored to a giant gas disk that orbits the black hole several light-years away, researchers say. It's like having two strands of rope connected to a fixed point, Morris said. As you spin the strands, they braid around each other in a double helix fashion. In this case the gas and dust of the nebula makes up the strands. "It's as if there's a bar across the middle [of the black hole], or a dumbbell shape, where the strands are anchored, and as it spins around, it twists the strands together," Morris told SPACE.com.
This process takes a long time, though, since the disk completes one orbit around the black hole roughly every 10,000 years. But that's an important number. "Once every 10,000 years is exactly what we need to explain the twisting of the magnetic field lines that we see in the double helix nebula," Morris said. Read more...

This waswritten by Bjorn Carey & seized 4 u at Space.com

Saved by 'sand' poured into the wounds

Detective Danny Johnson was on patrol outside Tampa, Florida, when a report came through of a possible shooting in a junkyard three blocks away. Arriving on the scene, he found an elderly man sitting on a tractor, with a large hole in his leg that was bleeding profusely. Realising it would be some time before the ambulance arrived, Johnson opened a packet of sand-like material and poured it into the wound. Within seconds the bleeding had practically stopped, and the man survived. "The medic told me that had I not put the substance in there, the guy would probably have bled out and died," he says. The material, called QuikClot, which is issued routinely to police officers in Hillsborough county, Florida, was developed for the US military to cut down the number of soldiers who bleed to death on the battlefield. More than 85 per cent of soldiers killed in action die within an hour of being wounded. Improved haemorrhage control "could probably save 20 per cent of the soldiers who are killed in action", says Hasan Alam, a trauma surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The material is already used by the navy and a few US police departments. Researchers would like to see it used more widely, but one major safety problem has prevented this happening. Now developers are hoping that advances in the material and the design of new substances could see blood clotting treatments used by ambulance crews, in operating theatres, and even in the home. Read more...

This was written by Jessica Marshall seized 4 u at New Scientist

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

USRobotics Introduces USB Telephone Adapter at CeBIT

USRobotics announced the introduction of its Skype certified USR9620 USB Telephone Adapter this week at CeBIT, the world’s largest trade fair showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions for home and work environments. USRobotics’ USB Telephone Adapter lets users make both Skype Internet Telephony calls and traditional PSTN calls via their existing PSTN telephone handset.
The USB Telephone Adapter is simple to install and use, and requires no additional hardware from a PSTN or broadband provider. Users connect an analog telephone line and a standard cordless or corded telephone to the USR9620, and then connect the USR9620 to a USB port on their computer running the Skype software and connected to the Internet via broadband.
“Our telephone adapter lets people use both Skype and their home phone line to make calls from the same telephone handset,” says Rizwan Akbar, USRobotics’ Product Manager. “The advanced features of the USR9620 allow users to save money on their long distance calling even when they are away from the computer running Skype.”
Telephones that can display caller ID are automatically enhanced to display Skype user name, as well as PSTN caller identification*. Advanced call waiting handling allows for notification of incoming calls (Skype or PSTN) while the phone is in use and lets users switch between the calls or even link a Skype call and a PSTN call in a three-way conference.
Intelligent forwarding of incoming Skype calls to mobile phones or landline phones and vice versa means USR9620 users will no longer have to stop using Skype’s low cost calling services when they are away from their computer. Simply configure the USR9620 to forward unanswered Skype calls to another phone number and the USB Telephone Adapter will forward the Skype call over the PSTN connection. Users can also access Skype via the PSTN or mobile network by dialing in to their USR9620 to place Skype and Skype Out calls from any remote location.

This was seized 4 u at USRobotics Web Site

Supercomputer Builds a Virus

One of the world's most powerful supercomputers has conjured a fleeting moment in the life of a virus. The researchers say the simulation is the first to capture a whole biological organism in such intricate molecular detail. The simulation pushes today's computing power to the limit. But it is only a first step. In future researchers hope that bigger, longer simulations will reveal details about how viruses invade cells and cause disease. Klaus Schulten at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and his colleagues built a computer model of the satellite tobacco mosaic virus, a tiny spherical package of RNA. Their success depended on the latest version of a computer program called NAMD, which Schulten and his colleagues have built over the past decade to simulate biological molecules. The program allows the several hundred different processors within a supercomputer to work in parallel on the same problem. Running on a machine at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Urbana, the program calculated how each of the million or so atoms in the virus and a surrounding drop of salt water was interacting with almost every other atom every femtosecond, or millionth of a billionth of a second. The team managed to model the entire virus in action for 50 billionths of a second. Such a task would take a desktop computer around 35 years, says Schulten. "This is just a first glimpse," he says. "But it looks gorgeous."
Read more...

This was seized 4 u at Nature

Get Isolated In The Internet

The website you never needed. Isolatr "helps you find where other people aren’t” - Lets get isolated...

Modern Cartogram Research

It is sometimes very useful to redraw the map of the world with the sizes of countries made bigger or smaller in order to represent something of interest. Such maps are called cartograms and can be an effective and natural way of portraying geographic or social data. If you are interested to see more cartograms, you might like to visit the website of the Worldmapper Project, where a group of researchers are gathering together an ever-growing collection of cartograms showing all sorts of aspects of the social, economic, and geographic world. The web site contains, among other things, downloadable posters of cartograms that you can print out, along with data sets, descriptions of the statistical analyses, and information about the methods used to produce the maps.

This was seized 4 u at Mark Newmans Homepage

Black holes: The ultimate quantum computers?

Nearly all of the information that falls into a black hole escapes back out, a controversial new study argues. The work suggests that black holes could one day be used as incredibly accurate quantum computers – if enormous theoretical and practical hurdles can first be overcome. Black holes are thought to destroy anything that crosses a point of no return around them called an "event horizon". But in the 1970s, Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to show black holes do emit radiation, which eventually evaporates them away completely. Originally, he argued that this "Hawking radiation" is so random that it could carry no information out about what had fallen into the black hole. But this conflicted with quantum mechanics, which states that quantum information can never be lost. Eventually, Hawking changed his mind and in 2004 famously conceded a bet, admitting that black holes do not destroy information. But the issue is far from settled, says Daniel Gottesman of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. "Hawking has changed his mind, but a lot of other people haven't," he told New Scientist. "There are still a lot of questions about what's really going on."
Read more...

This was seized 4 u at New Scientist

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Helping Blind Hamsters See

Nanotechnology has restored the sight of blind rodents, a new study shows. Scientists mimicked the effect of a traumatic brain injury by severing the optical nerve tract in hamsters, causing the animals to lose vision. After injecting the hamsters with a solution containing nanoparticles, the nerves re-grew and sight returned.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team hopes this technique could be used in future reconstructive brain surgery. Repairing nerve damage in the central nervous system after injury is seen as the ultimate challenge for neuroscientists, but so far success in this field has been limited. Nerve regeneration is set back by a number of factors, including scar tissue and gaps in brain tissue caused by the damage. And this can make treatment by medical and surgical methods very difficult.
To find a novel way around these problems, the team based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, and Hong Kong University looked towards nanotechnology - a branch of science involving the manipulation of atoms and molecules. The researchers injected the blind hamsters at the site of their injury with a solution containing synthetically made peptides - miniscule molecules measuring just five nanometres long. Once inside the hamster's brain, the peptides spontaneously arranged into a scaffold-like criss-cross of nanofibres, which bridged the gap between the severed nerves.
"The first thing we saw was that the brain had started to heal itself in the first 24 hours. We had never seen that before - so that was very surprising." The scientists looked at young hamsters with actively growing nerve cells, and also at adults hamsters whose nerves had stopped growing. "We found that we had got functional return of vision and orientating behaviour, which was very surprising to us because we thought we would have to promote cell growth, through the growth factors."
The scientists believe that they have overcome some of the barriers to nerve regeneration, and hope to be able to apply their work to medical applications at a later stage. "We are looking at this as a step process. If this can be used while operating on humans to mitigate damage during neurosurgery, that would be the first step," Dr Ellis-Behnke told the BBC News website."Eventually what we would look at is trying to reconnect disconnected parts of the brain during stroke and trauma." Read more...

This was seized 4 u at BBC

Planet hunters find 'super-Earth'

Planet hunters have discovered an icy "super-Earth" circling a distant star. International astronomers suspect it is a bare, icy, rocky world, much colder than the Earth and 13 times its mass. The planet was spotted last April but details have only just been revealed in a paper submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters. The extra-solar planet is one of a mere handful detected using a novel technique called microlensing. The planet orbits a star about half as big as our Sun, positioned some 9,000 light-years away. At -201C, it is one of the coldest extra-solar planets to be discovered. Andrew Gould, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, US, was one of the first people to discover it. He said the find has two main implications. "First, this icy 'super-Earth' dominates the region around its star that in our Solar System is populated by the gas-giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn," he said. "We've never seen a system like this before because we've never had the means to find them. "And second, these icy 'super-Earths' are pretty common. Roughly, 35% of all stars have them." Professor Gould is leader of the Microlensing Follow-up Network (MicroFUN) collaboration. It is one of several international groups looking for Earth-like planets in planetary systems other than our own using the phenomenon called gravitational microlensing. Since the 1990s, astronomers have discovered some 170 extra-solar, or exoplanets, a planet which orbits a star other than the Sun. There is great interest in finding extrasolar planets that are like the Earth, since these could, in theory, have the right conditions for supporting life. In January, a new planet 5.5 times the mass of the Earth - the smallest yet - became the third exoplanet to be detected by the microlensing technique. Tim Naylor, professor of astrophysics at Exeter University, UK, said microlensing had great promise for the future. "It holds out the promise that we will discover many Earth-sized planets with this technique," he told the BBC News website. Read more...

This was written by Helen Briggs 4 u at BBC

Confess, share & forgive at the godless aliance

i4Giveu.com must be one of the most stupid but logic and consequential ideas for a web2.0 website realized until now. The interface is appealing. Everything seems quite neat, sophisticated & well designed.
This senseless site is just great if you need a place to confess your sins or just have the need to judge others or even want to play God. Here is the cookbook right from i4Giveu.com:
You have the opportunity to confess on every sin you ever committed and be judged by the community if your worthy of a Forgiveness or Not.Every Confession is ranked with the Forgiven or No forgive ranking. Your reputation will be judged from Angel to devil upon your confession ranking, the higher the score the closer to Angel status you get and vise versa. Rank each confession after you truly decided on the sinners’ fate, The higher the score the closer to forgiveness.
Furthermore the "about page" states:
We make no claims about the validity of the statements found on this website and we also do not guarantee the identity of posters on this website. In fact, people probably aren’t who they say they are. We can’t be held responsible for any false accusations posted on this website. All text on this website is public domain and has no copyright or guarantee bound to it.

Monday, March 13, 2006

Google is reaching out for the Martians

Still waiting for "Google Andromeda" they at least have reached the nearest planet. If you need directions or just are curious visit Google.Mars.
Quoting the Google blog: We here on Earth have long held a fascination with the planet Mars. From Percival Lowell's sketches of its surface, to the countless books and movies that revolve around it, we've spent millenia studying and day-dreaming about our nearest neighbor in the solar system. In that tradition, NASA researchers Noel Gorelick and Michael Weiss-Malik from Arizona State University worked with us to combine Google Maps technology with some of the most detailed scientific maps of Mars ever made. In commemoration of Lowell's birthday, we're pleased to bring you Google Mars. Explore the red planet in three different ways: an elevation map shows color-coded peaks and valleys, a visible-imagery map shows what your eyes would actually see, and an infrared-imagery map shows the detail your eyes would miss. We hope you enjoy your trip to Mars.

This was seized 4 u at Google

The Physics Of Friendship

By comparing people to mobile particles randomly bouncing off each other, scientists have developed a new model for social networks. The model fits with empirical data to naturally reproduce the community structure, clustering and evolution of general acquaintances and even sexual contacts. Applying a mathematical model to the social dynamics of people presents difficulties not involved with more physical – and perhaps more rational – applications. The many factors that influence an individual’s fate to meet an acquaintance and decide to become a friend are impossible to capture, but physicists have used techniques from physical systems to model social networks with near precision.
By modeling people’s interactions based on how particles bounce off each other in an enclosed area, physicists Marta Gonzalez, Pedro Lind and Hans Herrmann found that the characteristics of social networks emerge “in a very natural way.” In a study recently published in Physical Review Letters, the scientists compared their model to empirical data taken from a survey of more than 90,000 U.S. students regarding friendships, and found similarities indicating that this model may serve as a novel approach for understanding social networks.
“The idea behind our model, though simple, is different from the usual paradigmatic approaches,” Gonzalez told PhysOrg.com. “We consider a system of mobile agents (students), which at the beginning have no acquaintances; by moving in a continuous space they collide with each other, forming their friendships.” Read more...
On the right you see the visualization of a high school’s empirical friendship network from the scientists’ data, the different colored (blue, green, purple, orange) nodes represent students in different grades. Links between nodes are drawn when a student nominates another student as a friend. In the recent study, physicists developed a novel model to describe this social network based on rules governing physical systems. Credit: Marta Gonzalez

This was seized 4 u at Physorg.com

Crazy Egg is watching you!

When ajax started getting popular some advertisers were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to track pageview stats anymore? Not so! Ajax gives you the ability to track visitors right down to their mouse moves. And guess what? Someone has finally implemented this idea - woot! Crazy Egg is a website tracking system that records every click by your users. It then produces a list, an overlay and a heat map that is overlaid on your site, allowing you to understand exactly what your users are doing. Read more...

Klick on the screenshot in order to enlarge-->

This was seized 4 u at Mashable

Sunday, March 12, 2006

Scientists Discover "Living Fossil" in Laos

When wandering through a hunter's market in Laos, Robert Timmins of the Wildlife Conservation Society happened upon a previously unknown rodent. Called kha-nyou by locals--or rock rat--the long-whiskered and furry-tailed rodent was reputed to favor certain limestone terrain. Western scientists named it Laonastes aenigmamus or stone-dwelling enigmatic mouse--partially because a live specimen has never been collected--and thought the rock rat represented a new family of mammals. But new research reported in today's Science proves that Laonastes actually represents a fossil come to life.
Paleontologist Mary Dawson of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and her team immediately recognized the strange rodent as a living member of a family thought to have been extinct for at least 11 million years: the Diatomyidae. Fossilized remnants of this group have been found throughout Asia with a distinctive jaw structure and molars. A new specimen of Diatomys discovered in June of last year in China bore an uncanny resemblance to Laonastes, including the same body size and tail span.
"It's the coelacanth of rodents," Dawson says, referring to the ancient fish believed extinct until a live specimen was hauled from the depths by South African fishermen. "One of the beautiful parts of this discovery was that we were able to correctly predict that Laonastes would have four roots in its molars just as in Diatomys."
The rock rat represents a rare opportunity to compare assumptions derived from the fossil record and an actual living specimen to determine overall accuracy of the techniques involved, the scientists argue. It also represents tantalizing support for the theory that many mammals evolved in Asia and later colonized other continents, as its closest living relative is the gundis--a guinea pig-like rodent of northern Africa.
Ultimately, kha-nyou provides a compelling argument for preservation efforts in Southeast Asia, joining tree shrews, flying lemurs and tarsiers as remnant populations of ancient mammal families in the region. "Laonastes is not the only new organism to be discovered in southeastern Asia," Dawson adds. "The highest priority must be given to preserving this unique biota and especially Laonastes while it is still possible." --David Biello

This was seized 4 u at Scientific American

Playing the Market: Music Meets Wall Street

What happens when you mix economic trend data with music? You get a surprisingly creative and haunting sound that is as diverse as today's global markets. The ethereal sound of Fibonacci's Random Walk contrasts the harsh, industrial rhythms of Irrational Exuberance and Industrial Century. The chilling Misery Index seems more at home as part of the soundtrack to a Japanese horror flick than an avant garde album.
Check out Playing the Market by Emerald Suspension

This was seized 4 u at CDBaby.com

Solar Storm Warning

It's official: Solar minimum has arrived. Sunspots have all but vanished. Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet. Like the quiet before a storm. This week researchers announced that a storm is coming--the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one," she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958. The picture on the right shows Intense auroras over Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1958. That was a solar maximum. The Space Age was just beginning: Sputnik was launched in Oct. 1957 and Explorer 1 (the first US satellite) in Jan. 1958. In 1958 you couldn't tell that a solar storm was underway by looking at the bars on your cell phone; cell phones didn't exist. Even so, people knew something big was happening when Northern Lights were sighted three times in Mexico. A similar maximum now would be noticed by its effect on cell phones, GPS, weather satellites and many other modern technologies. Read more...

This was seized 4 u at NASA

Blog Archive

Old Design:

New Design:

ABOUT Reseize.com

Contributors

Hot links

Interesting Links

Music Links

VOIP Links

about certificates & web of trust

Fun & Lifestyle Links

Feed for members at