Wednesday, September 26th, 2012
JON STEWART, - BBC News (UK)
Stephan: When I was a little boy, my great aunt Winifred, a maiden lady of a Victorian type -- a model no longer made -- WWI nurse, and founder of the children's convalescent movement told me of her trip in a German dirigible. She said it was the most amazing travel experience of a long life of travel, although very cold because the passenger cabin was unheated and, although people dressed for dinner, they had to wear outercoats. To a little boy the images that her descriptions conjured up were magical.
It now appears that this very sensible way to travel and move cargo may be returning. It would certainly be much more energy efficient.
If you like the idea of cruising on a ship in laid-back luxury, but prefer the speed and convenience of air travel, there may soon be a solution. Drawing their inspiration from the airships of yesteryear, a new generation of airship-like vehicles could soon be making their way across our skies.
In a hangar outside Tustin in California, engineers are preparing one of the most radical designs for testing. The Aeroscraft, as it is known, is the brainchild of Igor Pasternak and has been made possible by advances in materials and computer control systems.
‘We are resurrecting [the airship] with new composite fabric structures, that are stronger, lighter, more versatile
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Wednesday, September 26th, 2012
Stephan: It will be a generation, if ever, before Texas recovers from the damage done last year by drought -- a drought that is still ongoing. In 2011 alone it led to the loss of hundreds of millions of trees.
COLLEGE STATION, Texas — An updated ground and aerial survey indicates about 301 million trees have died in rural Texas because of the 2011 drought.
The Texas A&M Forest Service said Tuesday that the figure comes from an examination of hundreds of forested plots statewide.
The Texas agency last December announced a preliminary estimate of up to 500 million trees killed by the drought.
The three-month extended review used ground inspections and before-and-after satellite images. The findings represent trees in rural, forested areas that died from drought, insect infestation or disease due to drought stress.
The 301 million figure does not include trees that died in cities and towns. Experts earlier this year determined another 5.6 million trees in urban areas died as a result of the devastating drought.
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Wednesday, September 26th, 2012
MELISSA HEALY, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: One of the subjects that does not get properly discussed is that the rich and those in charge lead lives far less stressful than those in the bottom quintiles. It is a large factor in their relative qualities of life, as this report makes clear and, if you think about it, shouldn't be surprising.
Management consultants say 60% of senior executives experience high stress and anxiety on a regular basis, and a thriving industry of motivational speakers teaches business leaders how to manage their corrosive burden of stress. But just how uneasy lies the head that wears the crown?
Not so uneasy, it turns out.
A new study reveals that those who sit atop the nation’s political, military, business and nonprofit organizations are actually pretty chill. Compared with people of similar age, gender and ethnicity who haven’t made it to the top, leaders pronounced themselves less stressed and anxious. And their levels of cortisol, a hormone that circulates at high levels in the chronically stressed, told the same story.
The source of the leaders’ relative serenity was pretty simple: control.
Compared with workers who toil in lower echelons of the American economy, the leaders studied by a group of Harvard University researchers enjoyed control over their schedules, their daily living circumstances, their financial security, their enterprises and their lives.
‘Leaders possess a particular psychological resource – a sense of control – that may buffer against stress,’ the research team reported Monday in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.
Though the finding appeared to fly in the face of conventional […]
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Wednesday, September 26th, 2012
Stephan: The quality of violins seems about to be significantly improved, and the quality of a Stradivari may be available at a modest cost.
A few years ago Francis Schwarze noticed something unusual. Dr Schwarze, who works at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, in St Gallen, knew that sound travels faster through healthy wood, which is stiff and dense, than it does through the soft stuff left by a fungal attack. But some fungi, he found, do not slow sound. Moreover, the acoustic properties of wood so affected seem to be just what violin-makers desire. So Dr Schwarze had some violins made from the infected wood and discovered that they sounded like a Stradivarius.
Dr Schwarze is now trying to standardise this fungal treatment in order to make what he calls ‘mycowood
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Tuesday, September 25th, 2012
JOHN TIMMER, Science Editor - ars technica
Stephan: I try very hard to make sure the information in SR is fact based and reliable. But, sometimes, despite my best efforts, things have to be corrected. The recent anti-GMO story I ran in the face of much acclaim, does not appear to be holding up.
It is a grave error when, in the service of the good, one succumbs to the temptation to cheat. I understand the impulse, but I am ashamed for the scientists who did this.
Very little of the public gets their information directly from scientists or the publications they write. Instead, most of us rely on accounts in the media, which means reporters play a key role in highlighting and filtering science for the public. And-through embargoed material, press releases, and personal appeals-journals and institutions vie for press attention as a route to capturing the public’s imagination.
This system doesn’t always work smoothly. Just this year, we’ve seen a university promote a crazed theory of everything and researchers and journals combine to rewrite the history of science in order to promote their new results. But these unfortunate events are relatively minor compared to a completely cynical manipulation of the press that happened last week.
In this case, the offenders appear to be the scientists themselves. After getting a study published that raised questions about the safety of genetically modified food (GMOs), the researchers provided advanced copies to the press only if they signed an agreement that meant they could not consult outside experts. A live press conference and the first wave of press appeared before outside experts could weigh in-and many of them found the study to be seriously flawed.
Science journalism and the embargo system
Each […]
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