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"What we should be concerned about is desertification due to the lack of veg(e)tation"

Yet, science is uncovering that the opposite is happening, as an increase in CO2 levels may help forests to start reclaiming the world's deserts, as forests are encroaching on the Negev desert. Higher CO2 concentrations reduces water absorption of trees, leaving more available for the surrounding regions, which resulted in more vegetation.

NASA & DOE found the same thing, as did the National Academy of Sciences when they found that grasslands become wetter as temperatures rise. Hotter temperatures kills off certain species of grasses that are poor water storers, leaving more room for more efficient species like oaks and summer flowers, with a net increase in water retention.

The more we do true research into global warming, the more we find that our models are wrong, our assumtions are wrong, and our predjudices are wrong.

Ah yes, I too have the fond memories of old Apple mice, although my first was on an Apple IIE it did also come with "mousepaint" which -- looking back -- couldn't have been much fun on my 13" television screen and Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer.

As for right now, both at work and at home, I use the Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman . It has neat "forward" and "back" buttons for web browsing that even work fine in Linux. But of course I've always been a bit of a trackball fan. Several case studies claim that trackballs may be slightly more ergonomic because of "hand fit" issues and "reduced arm movement." I wonder what everyone else thinks about the whole trackball vs. conventional issue?

world's oldest currently operating college webcam

I know this is offtopic, but I think it's reasonable since the actual article disappeared. There was a "From the future' article about the Linux supercomputer at PNNL, but now it's gone. Here's a link:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/08/03082 7070828.htm

Was it a repeat?

"Mars appears to have locked up its atmosphere in minerals until it reached the point where the process largely stopped because liquid water ceased to exist at regional to global scales at the surface."

Man, oh, man...

20-25% is a little low, I'd say: anyone who is neurologically ill ( NOT "mentally ill", it's someone's nervous-system, not only-someone's-mind that's differently-functioning or distorted, and assuming blame onto someone's mind&meanings because you don't want to know that nervous-systems can get sick? fraud and bogosity!! ), and poor, ..
isn't going to have a chance at good treatment, and fighting neurological-wrongness AND holding-together one's conventional life and holding-together 1.5 jobs .. just isn't going to happen, so neurologically-ill are drastically more likely to end-up on the streets. ( Good Riddance!!, some clamour, protecting pretense and appearance that is Perfect and Right... )

Of course, malnutrition can cause neurological-illness that was hidden, to manifest, in anyone who'd been borderline... as can systematic abuse by "community"...

As for forcefully medicating?

Offer lethal-injection, every time you forcefully medicate someone, and you'll save more money, and make your "community" Nicer[tm], simply because it's so murderous to be medicated-against-one's-will with brain/mind-modifying/damaging chemicals
( in this province NO-ONE who's been diagnosed "schizophrenic", by any doctor, has the legal right to refuse being-medicated, or has the right to a second opinion, or the right to decide one's own affairs, for the rest of one's life, forever... someone may be allowed to refuse, or may not be, but it's no-longer a right -- this is actually a formalization of the previous regime, where some were held-down and injected, if they didn't cooperate, but .. that wasn't permitted into public knowledge... ) that sooner-or-later we'll chose the lethal-injection just for relief from abuse ( and you can say "See: it was Their Choice, we didn't make them choose! we just gave-them what they wanted" while grumbling that it took sooo long to pressure 'em/us into accepting ).
( BTW: real schizophrenia, being born with bits of brain missing, including social-place-awareness, and, in child-onset-schizophrenia, losing more-than 1/10th of one's brain in a kind of "brain-fire" or cell-death-cascade that starts in one's parietal tissue, is bad-enough that with care/help 10% of such slaughter their-own lives to escape the every-damn-second abuse that schizophrenia is. If someone is under continuous abuse, then adding a little more, like obliterating their basic human person-ness, can help put-em-under, make 'em choose to try becoming eternally-gone, much easier than a little abuse could put-a-healthy+robust-someone-under )

Beautiful-quote from a doctor, from the social-place-awareness link:
"The ability to recognise emotions is what makes us human, it is an essential attribute lost in schizophrenia."
Which declares, of course, that schizophrenics, not having this, aren't human.
Beauty, eh?

#define sarcasm

Think of the money everyone ( who counts )'ll save!!

Think of how we would be Putting Them Out Of Our^H^H^H Their Misery!!

Think of the convenience, the not having "schizos" anywhere among The Community's Beautiful And Perfect Pretense!!

The program could be extended to depressives, bipolars, multiple-personality-disorder people, non-Christians, people-with-unsightly-teeth, people-from-the-Middle-East
( like the crazy/commie Jew that "Jesus" is modelled-on, keeping-in-mind that the original person was Jewish, and NO Christian considers Jewishness right... obviously the original-person was fundamentally wrong!! ),
.. People who don't have proper clothing-sense,
.. People who don't have proper pretenses or manners!
.

Man, oh, man...

20-25% is a little low, I'd say: anyone who is neurologically ill ( NOT "mentally ill", it's someone's nervous-system, not only-someone's-mind that's differently-functioning or distorted, and assuming blame onto someone's mind&meanings because you don't want to know that nervous-systems can get sick? fraud and bogosity!! ), and poor, ..
isn't going to have a chance at good treatment, and fighting neurological-wrongness AND holding-together one's conventional life and holding-together 1.5 jobs .. just isn't going to happen, so neurologically-ill are drastically more likely to end-up on the streets. ( Good Riddance!!, some clamour, protecting pretense and appearance that is Perfect and Right... )

Of course, malnutrition can cause neurological-illness that was hidden, to manifest, in anyone who'd been borderline... as can systematic abuse by "community"...

As for forcefully medicating?

Offer lethal-injection, every time you forcefully medicate someone, and you'll save more money, and make your "community" Nicer[tm], simply because it's so murderous to be medicated-against-one's-will with brain/mind-modifying/damaging chemicals
( in this province NO-ONE who's been diagnosed "schizophrenic", by any doctor, has the legal right to refuse being-medicated, or has the right to a second opinion, or the right to decide one's own affairs, for the rest of one's life, forever... someone may be allowed to refuse, or may not be, but it's no-longer a right -- this is actually a formalization of the previous regime, where some were held-down and injected, if they didn't cooperate, but .. that wasn't permitted into public knowledge... ) that sooner-or-later we'll chose the lethal-injection just for relief from abuse ( and you can say "See: it was Their Choice, we didn't make them choose! we just gave-them what they wanted" while grumbling that it took sooo long to pressure 'em/us into accepting ).
( BTW: real schizophrenia, being born with bits of brain missing, including social-place-awareness, and, in child-onset-schizophrenia, losing more-than 1/10th of one's brain in a kind of "brain-fire" or cell-death-cascade that starts in one's parietal tissue, is bad-enough that with care/help 10% of such slaughter their-own lives to escape the every-damn-second abuse that schizophrenia is. If someone is under continuous abuse, then adding a little more, like obliterating their basic human person-ness, can help put-em-under, make 'em choose to try becoming eternally-gone, much easier than a little abuse could put-a-healthy+robust-someone-under )

Beautiful-quote from a doctor, from the social-place-awareness link:
"The ability to recognise emotions is what makes us human, it is an essential attribute lost in schizophrenia."
Which declares, of course, that schizophrenics, not having this, aren't human.
Beauty, eh?

#define sarcasm

Think of the money everyone ( who counts )'ll save!!

Think of how we would be Putting Them Out Of Our^H^H^H Their Misery!!

Think of the convenience, the not having "schizos" anywhere among The Community's Beautiful And Perfect Pretense!!

The program could be extended to depressives, bipolars, multiple-personality-disorder people, non-Christians, people-with-unsightly-teeth, people-from-the-Middle-East
( like the crazy/commie Jew that "Jesus" is modelled-on, keeping-in-mind that the original person was Jewish, and NO Christian considers Jewishness right... obviously the original-person was fundamentally wrong!! ),
.. People who don't have proper clothing-sense,
.. People who don't have proper pretenses or manners!
.

A quote: The increasing frequency of electricity outages and outage duration are due primarily to lack of quick voltage support, leading to voltage collapse in many regions of the country and poor quality of power...
The ETO can switch in less than 5us and carry up to 10kA. When closed it blocks up to 6kV

Using adaptive optics, Astronomers have been able to take pictures from earth that rival Hubble article. A newer space telescope could probably do better, but for now hubble isn't really that important.

For instance, this is not the first time Sean Gorman has been talked about:

Article in Science Daily

Plus, someone with the same email address has posts in rec.sports.rowing...

The bottom line is that if you know where to look, you can find out lots of stuff. Classifying this guy's dissertation isn't going to prevent someone else (from anywhere on the planet) using the same tools he did to do the same things he did.

We either have to control all information (hello, Mr. Orwell!) or accept that information can't be controlled and plan accordingly. It's been said many times before, but security through obsucrity just doesn't work.

Running the vehicle from a fuel cell will make the tree huggers happy...

Which just goes to show these folks are more anti-corporate than environmentalist.

Water Vapor, the main exhaust of fuel cells is the most serious greenhouse gas there is. Environmentalists state (when they admit that H2O is a greenhouse gas at all), that CO2 emissions amplify the greenhouse effect of H2O by warming the Earth and causing more H2O to be released, which warms the planet even more. Etc.

So, according to these people, adopting the hydrogen economy will simply accelerate this process by bypassing the intermediate CO2 step and pumping H2O directly into the atmosphere. According to this Study, the levels of H2O in the atmosphere are already getting uncomfortably high.

Therefore, to save the environment from global warming, we must abandon this reckless pursuit of the Hydrogren economy!

SOHO has served us well. That said, it's only made of metal plastic and silicon parts and after being blasted by the solar wind for so many years, it's bound to fail eventually. SOHO's replacement is called the STEREO mission. It will actually be 2 separate spacecraft that view the sun simultaneously, in order to acquire STEREOscopic observations of the corona and coronal mass ejections. It was sometimes difficult for SOHO to tell what direction a CME was traveling in because it had only one point of view. STEREO launches in 2005. In the meantime TRACE can do a few of the things SOHO did and while at it, do some things SOHO could never do, like take these SPECTACULAR movies and images of the corona and photosphere at very high spatial and temporal resolution.

The jellyfish protein introduced as a transgene in different organisms is known as green fluorescence protein, or GFP. There are actually quite a few derivatives of this protein with different spectral properties (e.g. see here http://www.clontech.com/gfp/excitation.shtml). Since the late 1990's, many researchers have engrafted GFP into the genome of mice as well as zebrafish to study developmental processes. GFP has also been used to label and track HIV-1 in light microscopy studies (see here, here, here, and here). Because of the protein's stability and ability to fluoresce under physiological conditions, it has been enormously useful to track live processes at the molecular level in real time. In short, this molecule rocks.

The researcher at NTU hasn't really done anything new or innovative, and patent rights to this molecule and its applications are in part held by Columbia University (at least they used to be). Thus even if a firm is interested in these glow-in-the-dark fish, they're likely going to pay significant royalties to be licensed to do so.

Everyone who's asking about the potential battery life/ polution from/ etc the fuel cells might like to read this article in scientific american. It's pretty old but gives a fair idea of what the technology involves. And heres a couple more.

Basically they have the potential for much longer battery life (magnitudes greater than lithium) and produce water and C02 as waste products. and cheap vodka could potentially be used for the fuel :)

So let me get this straight. You're going to take one of the most polluting combustion engines, and convert it into a 24-hour operating generator. Lawnmowers don't have anywhere near the filters that larger engines do and no catalytic converters to reduce emissions.

"In the Swedish testing, the researchers used regular unleaded fuel in a typical four-stroke, four horsepower lawn mower engine and found, after one hour, that the PAH emissions are similar to a modern gasoline-powered car driving approximately 150 kilometers (93 miles). A typical push-type lawn mower is run for an average of 25 hours per year, according to the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute."

So, running a lawnmower engine for 1 day is equivalent to the pollution put out by your average car in 2200 miles, about 2 months worth of standard driving.

...Do MUY ESTUPIDA stories like this one get posted, but truly fascinating stories, like the NEW SPECIES OF GIANT JELLYFISH and the NEW SPECIES OF TINY SEAHORSES get rejected?

Might I sugest: "Windows is Vulnerable to Virus (that eliminates brain cancer in mice)" or "Microsoft Patents Virus (that eliminates brain cancer in mice) Related Linux Project Now At Risk"

Might I sugest: "Windows is Vulnerable to Virus (that eliminates brain cancer in mice)" or "Microsoft Patents Virus (that eliminates brain cancer in mice) Related Linux Project Now At Risk"

Actually I submitted a story just yesterday about a research team that developed a virus that eliminates brain cancer in mice. Unfortunately I didn't mention Microsoft, Linux, or DRM in the story, so it got rejected.

H20 is not a greenhouse gas

That, my friend, is wrong.

Water is the most siginificant and most abundant greenhouse gas. It is also one we have the least control over. We do have some control over CO2 and Methane, and so that has been the primary focus of greenhouse gas reduction planning - but were a mechanism found to control water vapor, we might not have to bother much with controlling carbon based greenhouse gases.

If dumping a particular amount of water ( that's now on the land, in frozen state ) into the oceans, and reducing the heat-reflectivity of the planet, and increasing the temperature ( and therefore volume ) of the ocean's water ( remembering that the water's, oh, close to 10km thick, in places on this planet ), means that 6m or 7m of increase in sea-level ( 0.1% increase? ) makes me an idiot, perhaps the law of gravity makes me one too? or plate-tectonics? or sunshine or geometry does too?

Ice Shelfs Melt Very Quick

Previous Ice-Age Ends with SEVENTY foot sea-level change

So facts can be made non-valid, just because someone asserts them to be political?

..the researchers found that an Antarctic melting event called "Meltwater Pulse 1A," which occurred near the end of the last Ice Age about 14,600 years ago, raised [past tense, that: It *Happened*] Earth's sea levels about 70 feet in less than 500 years. The melting event simultaneously caused the North Atlantic circulation to turn on, causing widespread warming of the Northern Hemisphere. [emphasis mine]

Or how about this beauty of a quote:

"Earth's polar ice sheets are changing over relatively short time scales, that is, decades versus thousands of years," Rignot said. Thomas added that today's more precise, widespread measurements tell us rapid changes are common. "These observations run counter to much accepted wisdom about ice sheets, which, lacking modern observational capabilities, was largely based on 'steady-state' assumptions," Thomas said. [emphasis mine]

"accepted wisdom", is obviously using the term 'wisdom' in some sense I don't know of, but...

"The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets together hold enough ice to raise sea level by 70 meters (230 feet)," he said. "Even a small imbalance between snowfall and discharge of ice and melt water from ice sheets into the ocean could be a major contributor to the current sea level rise rate of 1.8 millimeters (0.07 inches) a year and impact ocean circulation and climate. During past periods of rapid deglaciation, ice sheet melting *raised* [past tense] sea level *orders of magnitude* faster than today. This is the real threat of the ice sheets." [emphasis mine]

-shrug- ...
..being an idiot, I obviously can't think to consider what 70 metres sea-level raising would mean, if it happened in only decades/coupla-centuries, since a 6-7m sea-level change isn't possible, by virtue of someone associating the concept with some political gunk of some kind...

So hate me, then, if it makes you happy, by all means..

I'll stick with externally verifyable fact, thanks.

If dumping a particular amount of water ( that's now on the land, in frozen state ) into the oceans, and reducing the heat-reflectivity of the planet, and increasing the temperature ( and therefore volume ) of the ocean's water ( remembering that the water's, oh, close to 10km thick, in places on this planet ), means that 6m or 7m of increase in sea-level ( 0.1% increase? ) makes me an idiot, perhaps the law of gravity makes me one too? or plate-tectonics? or sunshine or geometry does too?

Ice Shelfs Melt Very Quick

Previous Ice-Age Ends with SEVENTY foot sea-level change

So facts can be made non-valid, just because someone asserts them to be political?

..the researchers found that an Antarctic melting event called "Meltwater Pulse 1A," which occurred near the end of the last Ice Age about 14,600 years ago, raised [past tense, that: It *Happened*] Earth's sea levels about 70 feet in less than 500 years. The melting event simultaneously caused the North Atlantic circulation to turn on, causing widespread warming of the Northern Hemisphere. [emphasis mine]

Or how about this beauty of a quote:

"Earth's polar ice sheets are changing over relatively short time scales, that is, decades versus thousands of years," Rignot said. Thomas added that today's more precise, widespread measurements tell us rapid changes are common. "These observations run counter to much accepted wisdom about ice sheets, which, lacking modern observational capabilities, was largely based on 'steady-state' assumptions," Thomas said. [emphasis mine]

"accepted wisdom", is obviously using the term 'wisdom' in some sense I don't know of, but...

"The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets together hold enough ice to raise sea level by 70 meters (230 feet)," he said. "Even a small imbalance between snowfall and discharge of ice and melt water from ice sheets into the ocean could be a major contributor to the current sea level rise rate of 1.8 millimeters (0.07 inches) a year and impact ocean circulation and climate. During past periods of rapid deglaciation, ice sheet melting *raised* [past tense] sea level *orders of magnitude* faster than today. This is the real threat of the ice sheets." [emphasis mine]

-shrug- ...
..being an idiot, I obviously can't think to consider what 70 metres sea-level raising would mean, if it happened in only decades/coupla-centuries, since a 6-7m sea-level change isn't possible, by virtue of someone associating the concept with some political gunk of some kind...

So hate me, then, if it makes you happy, by all means..

I'll stick with externally verifyable fact, thanks.

If dumping a particular amount of water ( that's now on the land, in frozen state ) into the oceans, and reducing the heat-reflectivity of the planet, and increasing the temperature ( and therefore volume ) of the ocean's water ( remembering that the water's, oh, close to 10km thick, in places on this planet ), means that 6m or 7m of increase in sea-level ( 0.1% increase? ) makes me an idiot, perhaps the law of gravity makes me one too? or plate-tectonics? or sunshine or geometry does too?

Ice Shelfs Melt Very Quick

Previous Ice-Age Ends with SEVENTY foot sea-level change

So facts can be made non-valid, just because someone asserts them to be political?

..the researchers found that an Antarctic melting event called "Meltwater Pulse 1A," which occurred near the end of the last Ice Age about 14,600 years ago, raised [past tense, that: It *Happened*] Earth's sea levels about 70 feet in less than 500 years. The melting event simultaneously caused the North Atlantic circulation to turn on, causing widespread warming of the Northern Hemisphere. [emphasis mine]

Or how about this beauty of a quote:

"Earth's polar ice sheets are changing over relatively short time scales, that is, decades versus thousands of years," Rignot said. Thomas added that today's more precise, widespread measurements tell us rapid changes are common. "These observations run counter to much accepted wisdom about ice sheets, which, lacking modern observational capabilities, was largely based on 'steady-state' assumptions," Thomas said. [emphasis mine]

"accepted wisdom", is obviously using the term 'wisdom' in some sense I don't know of, but...

"The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets together hold enough ice to raise sea level by 70 meters (230 feet)," he said. "Even a small imbalance between snowfall and discharge of ice and melt water from ice sheets into the ocean could be a major contributor to the current sea level rise rate of 1.8 millimeters (0.07 inches) a year and impact ocean circulation and climate. During past periods of rapid deglaciation, ice sheet melting *raised* [past tense] sea level *orders of magnitude* faster than today. This is the real threat of the ice sheets." [emphasis mine]

-shrug- ...
..being an idiot, I obviously can't think to consider what 70 metres sea-level raising would mean, if it happened in only decades/coupla-centuries, since a 6-7m sea-level change isn't possible, by virtue of someone associating the concept with some political gunk of some kind...

So hate me, then, if it makes you happy, by all means..

I'll stick with externally verifyable fact, thanks.

Sun's Output Increasing in Possible Trend Fueling Global Warming

And another:

NASA Study Finds Increasing Solar Trend That Can Change Climate

Science Daily has an article about it too, saying "Scientists arriving on the scene of a gamma-ray burst just moments after the explosion, have witnessed the death of a gigantic star and the birth of something monstrous in its place, quite possibly a brand new, spinning black hole."

This is exciting, seems like we have a first hand look at the formation of a black hole!

According to this kiddy looking article, I don't think you're vulnerable if you have caching off.

Science Daily is reporting today that UCLA chemists have found a new method for producing Carbon Nanoscrolls. It appears to be a cheaper alternative to Nanotubes. Edit: I see a previous AC poster mentioned this briefly. Well, this expands on it a bit.

UCLA chemists report in the Feb. 28 issue of Science a room-temperature chemical method for producing a new form of carbon called carbon nanoscrolls. Nanoscrolls are closely related to the much touted carbon nanotubes but have significant advantages over them, said Lisa Viculis and Julia Mack, the lead authors of the Science article and graduate students in the laboratory of Richard B. Kaner, UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry.

Dear Scorilo - I hope and pray your father gets better.

> This very militantism makes me take the medical establishment counterclaims
> re: ozone with a grain of salt.
You made some good and balanced points. I just wanted to make sure you didn't miss the posting a little below this thread -- it links to this story on human antibodies producing ozone to attack bacteria and fungi. Maybe the autohemotherapy you wrote about earlier could help destroy cancer cells in a similar fashion?

The Science Daily story links to the abstract of the published research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It seems that publication date is 24 Feb - so you could try reading that issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in a University library, or try to contact the paper authors for more input.

Best wishes to your father and your family.

Interesting timing. From Science daily today

"Led by TSRI President Richard Lerner, Ph.D. and Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry Paul Wentworth, Jr, Ph.D., who made the original discovery, the team has been slowly gathering evidence over the last few years that the human body produces the reactive gas [ Ozone ]--most famous as the ultraviolet ray-absorbing component of the ozone layer--as part of a mechanism to protect it from bacteria and fungi. "

Finally a sensible opinion. But except for this last paragraph which seems to be from the opinion itself, the journalist writes as though the ruling only applies to IR radiation. If that is the case then I suspect that in the coming years the police and other agencies will pick this fight again and again at every other frequency band in the spectrum.

ScienceDaily has a story today "Study Is First To Confirm Link Between Exercise And Changes In Brain", basically saying that using your body keeps your brain functioning. It's like love: the more you give, the more you've got. Humans have few limits except the ones we place on ourselves.

ScienceDaily has a story today "Study Is First To Confirm Link Between Exercise And Changes In Brain", basically saying that using your body keeps your brain functioning. It's like love: the more you give, the more you've got. Humans have few limits except the ones we place on ourselves.

Google link for VEGF

...that it's not another clump of rubble? The Story

Essentially, the embryonic stem cells have failed to produce very promising results because of rejection or tumor formation (in many cases). Adult stem cells, which are pluripotential (not totipotential), have no rejection problems because they are autologously donated. Searching Google on "bone marrow stem cells" produces a variety of results, like this plea for funding from a Russian biologist: Why cloning? or this from Science Daily or Bone Marrow Stem Cells can become almost anything.

More info here
and
here

SealBeater

Is it really what we want/need as humans? I'm not sure. But I for one won't wager a guess until there's more research done in the area, so I say let's explore it more before we defame it conclusively or support it as a technological breakthrough.

Some other recent news items:
Nabda, Unesco Collaborate in Bioinformatics Training
AllAfrica.com,Africa-05 Dec 2002
... Development Agency (NABDA) and the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural
Organisation (UNESCO), penultimate Tuesday held a two-day Bioinformatics ...

Bioinformatics ahead for Danville
Danville Register and Bee,VA-30 Nov 2002
... Developing these plants will involve both horticulture and bioinformatics and will
be one major focus of Danville's Institute for Advanced Learning and Research ...

The race to computerise biology
Economist (subscription),UK-12 Dec 2002
Welcome to the world of bioinformatics--a branch of computing concerned
with the acquisition, storage and analysis of biological data. ...

Observing Proteins And Cells In The Wild: Quantum Dots May ...
Science Daily-13 Dec 2002
... Today it is internationally renowned for research and graduate education
in the biomedical sciences, chemistry, bioinformatics and physics. ...

Science Daily has a better article (as always) here

The mention of the "tilt" is a mangled reference to the tilt or angle of the orbital plane with respect to our view point. The planet eclipses the star (changing it the apparent magnitude ("brightness") of the star -- that's what they observed) so you know the orbit is edge on to us. Combine that info with the previously measured radial velocity and you can get the actual mass of the planet not just the minimum mass of the planet.

Article follows:

Hubble Makes Precise Measure Of Extrasolar World's True Mass

NASA Hubble Space Telescope's crisp view has allowed an international team of astronomers to apply a previously unproven technique (astrometry) for making a precise measurement of the mass of a planet outside our solar system. The Hubble results place the planet at 1.89 to 2.4 times the mass of Jupiter, our solar system's largest world. Previous estimates, about which there are some uncertainties, place the planet's mass between 1.9 and 100 times that of Jupiter's.

A Hubble set of instruments called Fine Guidance Sensors (FGSs), which are also used to point and stabilize the free-flying observatory, measured a small "side-to-side" wobble of the red dwarf star Gliese 876. This is due to the tug of an unseen companion object, designated Gliese 876b (Gl 876b) and first discovered in 1998 with ground-based telescopes.

Gl 876b is only the second extrasolar planet (after HD 209458) for which a precise mass has been determined, and it is the first whose mass has been confirmed by using the astrometry technique.

Now that this technique has been proven viable for space-based observatory planet confirmations, it will be used in the future to nail down uncertainties in the masses of dozens of extrasolar planets discovered so far.

The observations were made by George F. Benedict and Barbara McArthur (University of Texas at Austin), members of the international observing team led by Thierry Forveille (Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Corporation, Hawaii and Grenoble Observatory, France). The results are being published in the December 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Benedict had to observe the star's yo-yo motion for over two years, using a total of 27 orbits worth of Hubble Space Telescope observations. "Making these kinds of measurements of a star's movement on the sky is quite difficult," Benedict emphasizes. "We're measuring angles (.5 milliarcsecond) equivalent to the size of a quarter seen from 3,000 miles away.

The target planet, Gl 876b, is the more distant of two planets orbiting Gliese 876. It was originally discovered by two groups, led by Xavier Delfosse (Geneva/Grenoble Observatory) and Geoffrey Marcy (U.C. Berkeley and San Francisco State University). Marcy's group discovered a smaller planet closer to Gliese 876 a year later, in 1999. These initial discoveries were made by measuring the star's subtle "to-and-fro" speed. This is called the radial velocity technique.

Benedict and McArthur combined the astrometric information with the radial velocity measurements (made in the planet's discovery) to determine the planet's mass by deducing its orbital inclination. If astronomers don't know how the planet's orbit is tilted with respect to Earth, they can only estimate a minimum mass for the planet. But without knowing more, the mass could be significantly larger if the orbit was tilted to a nearly face-on orientation to Earth. The star would still move towards and away from us slightly, even though it had a massive companion. "You can't hide massive companions from the Hubble Space Telescope," says McArthur. "The planet's orbit turns out to be tilted nearly edge-on to Earth. This verifies it is a low-mass object."

"There are a few more stars where we can do this kind of research with Hubble," Benedict says. "Most candidate stars are too distant. Astronomers can look forward to doing these kinds of studies on literally hundreds of stars with the planned NASA Space Interferometry Mission, called SIM, which will be far more precise than Hubble.

"Knowing the mass of extrasolar planets accurately is going to help theorists answer lots of questions about how planets form," Benedict adds. "When we get hundreds of these mass determinations for planets around all types of stars, we're going to see what types of stars form certain types of planets. Do big stars form big planets and small stars form small planets?"

Measuring stellar wobbles on the sky has been used to search for planets for decades. But extremely high precision and telescope optical stability are required. The Hubble FGSs are the first astrometric tool to accomplish this ultra-precise kind of measurement for an extrasolar planet.

The gas giant plant orbiting the sunlike star HD 209458 is the very first planet to have its mass verified by using transit and radial velocity data. This was only possible because the planet was discovered to be passing in front of the star every four days, slightly dimming the star's light. This is proof the orbit is edge-on, yielding a mass that agrees with the lower limit estimate of .7 Jupiter masses.

Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here.

Another fact, Europe likes to trumpet their use of diesel over the U.S., but recent studies have shown that while diesel reduces CO2, it increases soot Science Daily. The net effect is at no real change, and more likely it actually make global warming worse.

Oh, I forgot this is Slashdot, Europe is enlightened, the U.S. is the bumbling oaf.

The MRI machines used in hospitals have 8-12 ton magnets. The biggest magnet now is 150 tons.

Size does matter ;p. So it is important to point out that a small effective sphere of 8T is much less impressive than a gigantic one of lesser field strength. The Earth relatively "weak" magnetic field has an impressively large area of efficacy that HAMs can attest to. HAARP and the aurora borealis show how large scale weak fields can, if you were to find the total potential the field provides rather than its peak strength, do huge tasks.

Is that the best way to explain it? "if you were to summate all the potential the field provides" rather than look at peak values?

I don't mean to over-hype my de-hype (to further abuse the language); just a grain of salt in the context of the article about staph, which I felt to be misleading. This misdirection doesn't imply there's nothing to fear, and infectious disease is certainly going to be a growth business for some time to come. (Of course, it is the job of specialists in the field to worry about what's to come.) But the antibitoic resistant bacteria problem is still largely in the future, a class different from the sort of infections most of us face.

Maybe that future is arriving faster than I thought... Be nice if we could do something about those "breeding grounds" in the meantime. It's depressing to see someone older go to the hospital with a broken hip to die of pneumonia. Also, the kids who have died because of the poor sanitation in meat packing are so betrayed by a system that responds not with rules but "cook the meat more."

On prescribing antibiotics, assuming the clinician is not ignorant or pandering, it must be difficult. There's always going to be a fear of injury and liability resulting from undertreatment. This comes up with the treatment of ear infections in infants and toddlers. Most such infection resolve themselves without treatment, but the 1 in 5 (or whatever -- there was a study) that don't can cause hearing loss, impaired learning of speech, and so on.

FWIW -- not too helpful -- here's the CDC page on antibiotic resistance with a quiz!

Hmm, cranberry juice cocktail might be used against infection. You never know what will help.

Kilimanjaro is just one small part of a much bigger trend of glaciers around the world shrinking. In fact, a majority of the world's glaciers are shrinking according to a USGS study.
While almost all climate scientists agree global warming is happening, some are still unsure about whether it is being caused by humans.

There are more possible states of a go board than the current estimated number of atoms in the universe. I think storing that may be a little more than 5 years off.

Current estimates are between 10^76 and 10^79 atoms in the universe

The number of possible moves in a go game starts at 361, and goes down by roughly one per move. Thus the upper limit on go states is near 361! which is around 10^750. This puts perfect Go a little out of reach. More on AI Go

According to this article, "Components of the atmosphere, like ozone and water, are changing in different levels of the atmosphere." According to Martinez-Frias, these changes are BAD

However, did you know that the change taking place is not what you thought??? The ozone hole is actually getting SMALLER!!!

So we hear for 10-20 years that we are ruining the environment, damaging the ozone layer, and that this damage is irreparable (OK, so it takes a long time...but I don't want to wait 50 years). However, come to find out that it is reparable. I'm going back to using AquaNet!

But that's not enough for those environmentalists out there...they need to have something to whine about. Since they can't complain that the ozone is getting bigger, they'll say that "changes" (they won't specify for the better or for the worse) are causing the "sky to fall!"

The only thing that this teaches me is to never trust an evironmentalist. Not only was the "irreparable" ozone hole, in fact, reparable, it is BAD to fix it...it causes ice to fall out of the sky.

Now, I don't know much about weather or the environment, and I don't doubt that changes in the environment are causing some weird things to happen, but I do know that some really freaky stuff has happened in the past, and will probably continue to happen in the future.

Just stop complaining about it!!! :)

cool, here and here are some interesting links I found, thanks for the "oak" tip.

You might want to check up on new/upcoming surgeries which provide "super vision" - these new techniques correct for much finer imperfections in the cornea, making the limiting factor the quality of your retina. Also, supposedly this surgery does away with the risk of night vision haloing (It actually looks to improve night vision). Here's a couple of links -

Good Introduction
Super Technical

This is the stuff I'm waiting for.

Back in high school, I was involved in a solar car project. The main problem with mainstreaming solar cars is the solar cells. The 10 cm X 10 cm wafers of silicon are too delicate and rigid. Flexible solar cells made of plastic and organic materials promises to change this. Depending on how efficient they can be made to be, solar cells may make it into production cars one day.

Well, Cliff,

There's plenty of good stuff out there, but you'll have to do some editing. As somebody who grew up around teachers and has worked in textbook publishing I can assure you that teachers all have to do it too. Their stuff sucks far worse than anything referenced here.

While Project Gutenberg is great, you should also check out on-line encyclopedias like NuPedia, and Everything2 which are all open source, as is The Open Directory Project . A great source of fiction, which can be a wonderful learning tool, is Baen Books who have put hundreds of book online and are eager to have them downloaded and spread around.

For science materials, there are lots of great sites for kids done by educators pursuing whever they're into. All of which you'll want to use to spice up access to sites like Science Daily that are handy but a bit too serious some days for young minds.

Which brings me to Make Stuff which should fill in quite nicely for the "arts and crafts" part of most school curricula.

For biography I'ld check out American National Biography and for history a good start can be made with pages like Anyday which can be amazing or useless, all based on where *you* go from the starting point that they provide. Places like Colonial America are designed just for this but again, check out more than one.

For reference material you should check out Theodora which, while not meant to be open source, is very handy, Geographic.Org, which is open source and student-oriented, should do the rest. I've found that the CIA sourcebook is terrible, as folk should have long since figured out. Biased, misinformed, and sometimes just wierd; leave it behind. However if you hunt you'll find that within various.gov sites there's tons of great stuff, from manuals on camping to stuff on solar panels.

The space science community is very kid friendly, from NASA down to the local Mars Society chapter, having plenty of materials on quite a range of topics that you're free to reproduce and spread around. If you can handle it, the neopagan community is reliably eager to provide information and links on ancient indo-european history, from the government of Sumeria, to Celtic ironwork. (You might be surprised at how many neopagans have advanced degrees in history and/or literature.)

Speaking of limits, you'll always have to be careful that your kids aren't ending up places they shouldn't be but again, every teacher and librarian faces that one.

Lastly, the reason that I've got all this ready to hand is that I took it from my source database, more of which can be found on my web site, which is primarily oriented towards adults and older kids but does have plenty of other links like the ones here.

Best of luck to you and be sure to post back to slashdot in a few years about how it's going.

Rustin H. Wright - Information Geek
"It's all about the information, Marty. Little ones and zeros!"

Speak of the devil, Science Daily features a caffeine study today: Jolting Joe

I will list what I know of population dynamics, in order to show you my point of view.

1. Humans beings belong to the animal family. We obey laws of population dynamics like all other animals. That we can effect the situation to take better advantage of biological laws doe not make us immune to their effects.
2. All animals have a population size that food supply appears as a principal functor. Any "win" on the amount of food produces a "win" in the population size. "You are what you eat" does not only have meaning as a cliché. It speaks a truth about animal populations. The more we have to eat, the more of us we can make.
3. Through our agricultural processes, we have embarked a journey of converting all biomass into human and food for humans. We did this by denying our competition any food. Chickens must live so foxes must die. Cows must live so wolves must die. Corn must live so bugs must die. We currently consume about 200 species a day to make room for humans and food for humans.
4. Each year, on average, we produce more food. Each year, on average, we had more children. Our outlook on Nature as an infinite resource meant for human taming covered up the dynamic nature that species depend on each other.
5. We require several biosystems to survive. We need oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen to form our atmosphere and grease the wheels of us and other life forms we depend on for food. We need dense plant cover to prevent erosion and facilitate temperate climates. We require fungus and bacterial systems to dispose of waste. Without these systems, we will not survive.
6. The only variable of the food/population cycle that we have the strongest control over seems like the food side. Extra food always brings a win on the population side, if not where the food grew then where that food got shipped.
7. Thus to reduce the human population in order to stop the consumption of our life support biosystems, we must produce less food.

Even if a 50-year limit seems like an alarmist position, many conservative scientists agree that 100 years looks like the maximum timeframe. Change must happen quickly for us to save a habitat that humanity can live in.

Some possible research materials for you:

http://www.ku.edu/~hazards/foodpop.pdf

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/10/011 02 6074943.htm


http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Science/

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Jt
crulx@iaxs.net

I think it's possible to save *some* $$$ by building your own. But where you really start to cut your cost down is in reusable parts. Floppy drive? Reuse it! Sound Card? Reuse it! You can keep a top of the line system going for several years just by replacing just the mobo, RAM, and processor when the "sweet spot" enters your price range. Add on "nice to haves" like a better video card or a bigger HD when the budget allows. If this comes around, we'll all be enjoying cheap PCs on our sleeve.