For ages, mankind has craved a tool that can provide early warning of that terrifying moment when the earth begins to shake. But if a scientific paper published on Wednesday is confirmed, we may at last have found one. The best hope yet of an earthquake predictor could lie in a small, brown, knobbly amphibian, it suggests. The male common toad (Bufo bufo) gave five days’ warning of the earthquake that ravaged the town of L’Aquila in central Italy on April 6, 2009, killing more than 300 people and displacing 40,000 others, the study says. Biologist Rachel Grant of Britain’s Open University embarked on a toad-monitoring project at San Ruffino lake, 74 kilometres (46 miles) north of L’Aquila, 10 days before the 6.3-magnitude quake struck. Her two-person team observed the site for 29 days, counting toad numbers and measuring temperature, humidity, wind speed, rainfall and other conditions. By March 28, more than 90 male toads had mustered for the spawning season, but two days later, their numbers suddenly fell, Grant reports. By April 1 — five days before the quake — 96 percent of the males had fled. Several dozen ventured back […]
Scientists working on the European machine have smashed beams of protons together at energies that are 3.5 times higher than previously achieved. Tuesday’s milestone marks the beginning of work that could lead to the discovery of fundamental new physics. There was cheering and applause in the LHC control room as the first collisions were confirmed. These seven-trillion-electronvolt (TeV) collisions have initiated 18-24 months of intensive investigations at the LHC. Scientists hope the studies will bring novel insights into the nature of the cosmos and how it came into being. Many of them have described Tuesday’s event as the beginning of a ‘new era in science’. But researchers caution that the data gathered from the sub-atomic impacts will take time to evaluate, and the public should not expect immediate results. ‘Major discoveries will happen only when we are able to collect billions of events and identify among them the very rare events that could present a new state of matter or new particles,’ said Guido Tonelli, a spokesman for the CMS detector at the LHC. ‘This is not going to happen tomorrow. It will require months and years of patient work,’ he told […]
CHICAGO — THE renewable-fuel standard released in February by America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) paints an ambitious picture of biofuels’ future. It wants the amount of the stuff used as transport fuel to climb from 13 billion gallons (49 billion litres) in 2010 to 36 billion gallons in 2022, requiring by far the largest part of that increase to come from various advanced biofuels, rather than ethanol made from corn (maize). But although the future looks exciting, the present is rather grim. The EPA has been forced to slash its 2010 mandate for the most widely touted of the non-corn biofuels, cellulosic ethanol, from 100m gallons to just 6.5m, less than a thousandth of the 11 billion gallons produced from corn in 2009. The fact that corn-ethanol production has continued to grow, despite the failure of a number of firms in late 2008 and early 2009, points to the efficacy of the various protections and subsidies it enjoys (falling maize prices helped too), though it says nothing about their efficiency or wisdom. Ethanol, which is used mainly as an additive to petrol, is not a particularly good fuel: it offers only about two-thirds as much energy as petrol and […]
Magnets can alter a person’s sense of morality, according to a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using a powerful magnetic field, scientists from MIT, Harvard University and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are able to scramble the moral center of the brain, making it more difficult for people to separate innocent intentions from harmful outcomes. The research could have big implications for not only neuroscientists, but also for judges and juries. ‘It’s one thing to ‘know’ that we’ll find morality in the brain,’ said Liane Young, a scientist at MIT and co-author of the article. ‘It’s another to ‘knock out’ that brain area and change people’s moral judgments.’ Before the scientists could alter the brain’s moral center, they first had to find it. Young and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to locate an area of the brain known as the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ) which other studies had previously related to moral judgments. While muscle movement, language and even memory are found in the same place in each individual, the RTPJ, located behind and above the ear, resides in a slightly different location in each person. For […]
LONDON — The sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea risks becoming a drug-resistant ‘superbug’ if doctors do not devise new ways of treating it, a leading sexual health expert said. Catherine Ison, a specialist on gonorrhea from Britain’s Health Protection Agency said a World Health Organization (WHO) meeting in Manila next week would be vital to efforts to try to stop the bug repeatedly adapting to and overcoming drugs. ‘This is a very clever bacteria. If this problem isn’t addressed, there is a real possibility that gonorrhea will become a very difficult infection to treat,’ she said in a telephone interview. Gonorrhea is a common bacterial sexually-transmitted infection and if left untreated can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and infertility in women. Globally, the WHO estimates that there are at least 340 million new cases of curable sexually transmitted infections — including syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia and trichomoniasis — every year among people aged 15 to 49. Ison said the highest incidences of gonorrhea were in south and southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, but as yet the WHO has no breakdown by individual infection type. Current treatment for gonorrhea in most countries consists of a […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
