Moon (movie) on DVD

It’s one of those (unfortunately rare) movies that combine a brilliant storyline with a quality actor and tasteful directing/editing. And the soundtrack – part of which you can hear in the trailer – sets the vibe perfectly. All for a fraction of the cost of most ‘blockbusters’.

Moon is now out on DVD and BluRay in the UK. The BluRay version is multi-region (despite what Amazon UK says), so US readers can purchase it if they can’t wait for the January 12 release in the States. – DailyGrail

At lat Particle Collider starts; no black holes have swallowed the Earth yet

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most expensive science experiment, produced its first collisions Monday, said scientists at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research outside Geneva.

Seemingly making up for lost time after years of disasters and delays, the collisions came only three days after engineers had begun shooting the subatomic particles known as protons around their 17-mile underground racetrack. The physicists announced that they had succeeded in making the beams collide, producing what they called “candidate collision events” in the giant particle detectors in the collider.

The collider has been built at a cost of $9 billion and 15 years to accelerate protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts apiece and then slam them together in an attempt to recreate forces and particles that reigned during the first moments of the Big Bang. But for much of that time, the only things that have gone bang in the collider were magnets and other components, most notably in September 2008 after the first time protons circled the collider.

When the beams began circulating at last again on Friday, CERN officials said they expected the first collisions to happen in early December.

“It’s a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time,” CERN’s director general, Rolf Heuer, said in a news release from CERN. “But we need to keep a sense of perspective — there’s still much to do before we can start the LHC physics program.”

In the control rooms of the collider and of the four giant particle detectors, built and staffed by thousands of physicists who have the job of interpreting the data from the beginning of time, there were cheers and champagne. “It’s going much faster than anticipated,” Pauline Gagnon, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin who works at CERN, said in an e-mail message.

Michael Tuts of Columbia University said he and his colleagues were “ecstatic at the news!” But the most important scientific results from the collider are still far in the future, scientists said.

Today’s collisions were basically a test of the collider systems’ ability to synchronize the beams, in which bunches of protons travel along at nearly the speed of light, and make them collide at the right points. The protons were at their so-called injection energies of 450 billion electron volts, a far cry from the energies the machine will eventually achieve.

via – NYTimes

Growing Meat without Animals, and the Dark Side thereof

Winston Churchill once predicted that it would be possible to grow chicken breasts and wings more efficiently without having to keep an actual chicken. And in fact scientists have since figured out how to grow tiny nuggets of lab meat and say it will one day be possible to produce steaks in vats, sans any livestock.Pork chops or burgers cultivated in labs could eliminate contamination problems that regularly generate headlines these days, as well as address environmental concerns that come with industrial livestock farms.

However, such research opens up strange and perhaps even disturbing possibilities once considered only the realm of science fiction. After all, who knows what kind of meat people might want to grow to eat?

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Advantages touted
Increasingly, bioengineers are growing nerve, heart and other tissues in labs. Recently, scientists even reported developing artificial penis tissue in rabbits. Although such research is meant to help treat patients, biomedical engineer Mark Post at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and his colleagues suggest it could also help feed the rising demand for meat worldwide.

The researchers noted that growing skeletal muscle in labs — the kind people typically think of as the meat they eat — could help tackle a number of problems:

• Avoiding animal suffering by reducing the farming and killing of livestock.
• Dramatically cutting down on food-borne ailments such as mad cow disease and salmonella or germs such as swine flu, by monitoring the growth of meat in labs.
• Livestock currently take up 70 percent of all agricultural land, corresponding to 30 percent of the world’s land surface, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Labs would presumably require much less space.
• Livestock generate 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than all of the vehicles on Earth, the FAO added. Since the animals themselves are mostly responsible for these gases, reducing livestock numbers could help alleviate global warming.

Need to scale up
Stem cells are considered the most promising source for such meat, retaining as they do the capacity to transform into the required tissues, and the scientists pointed to satellite cells, which are the natural muscle stem cells responsible for regeneration and repair in adults. Embryonic stem cells could also be used, but they are obviously plagued by ethical concerns, and they could grow into tissues besides the desired muscles.

To grow meat in labs from satellite cells, the researchers suggested current tissue-engineering techniques, where stem cells are often embedded in synthetic three-dimensional biodegradable matrixes that can present the chemical and physical environments that cells need to develop properly. Other key factors would involve electrically stimulating and mechanically stretching the muscles to exercise them, helping them mature properly, and perhaps growing other cells alongside the satellite cells to provide necessary molecular cues.

So far past scientists have grown only small nuggets of skeletal muscle, about half the size of a thumbnail. Such tidbits could be used in sauces or pizzas, Post and colleagues explained recently in the online edition of the journal Trends in Food Science & Technology, but creating a steak would demand larger-scale production.

Dark thoughts
The expectation is that if such meat is ever made, scientists will opt for beef, pork, chicken or fish. However, science fiction has long toyed with the darker possibilities that cloned meat presents.

In Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s epic sci-fi satire “Transmetropolitan,” supermarkets and fast food joints sell dolphin, manatee, whale, baby seal, monkey and reindeer, while the Long Pig franchise sells “cloned human meat at prices you like.”

“In principle, we could harvest the meat progenitor cells from fresh human cadavers and grow meat from them,” Post said. “Once taken out of its disease and animalistic, cannibalistic context — you are not killing fellow citizens for it, they are already dead — there is no reason why not.”

- via msnbc

We also may be able to sample things like T-rex meat one day.  Probably tastes like chicken.

Intel Wants Brain Implants in Its Customers’ Heads by 2020

If the idea of turning consumers into true cyborgs sounds creepy, don’t tell Intel researchers. Intel’s Pittsburgh lab aims to develop brain implants that can control all sorts of gadgets directly via brain waves by 2020.

The scientists anticipate that consumers will adapt quickly to the idea, and indeed crave the freedom of not requiring a keyboard, mouse, or remote control for surfing the Web or changing channels. They also predict that people will tire of multi-touch devices such as our precious iPhones, Android smart phones and even Microsoft’s wacky Surface Table.

Turning brain waves into real-world tech action still requires some heavy decoding of brain activity. The Intel team has already made use of fMRI brain scans to match brain patterns with similar thoughts across many test subjects.

Plenty of other researchers have also tinkered in this area. Toyota recently demoed a wheelchair controlled with brainwaves, and University of Utah researchers have created a wireless brain transmitter that allows monkeys to control robotic arms.

There are still more implications to creating a seamless brain interface, besides having more cyborgs running around. If scientists can translate brain waves into specific actions, there's no reason they could not create a virtual world with a full spectrum of activity tied to those brain waves. That’s right — we’re seeing Matrix creep.

via Intel Wants Brain Implants in Its Customers’ Heads by 2020 | Popular Science.

Experimental Soviet “flying tank”

The Antonov A-40 Krylya Tanka was a Soviet attempt to allow a tank to glide into a battlefield after being towed aloft by an airplane, to support airborne forces or partisans. A prototype was built and tested in 1942, but was found to be unworkable. This vehicle is sometimes called the A-40T or KT.

Instead of loading light tanks onto gliders, as other nations had done, Soviet airborne forces had strapped T-27 tankettes underneath heavy bombers and landed them on airfields. In the 1930s there were experimental efforts to parachute tanks or simply drop them into water. During the 1940 occupation of Bessarabia, light tanks may have been dropped from a few metres by TB-3 bombers, allowing them to roll to a stop with the gearbox in neutral.

The biggest problem with air-dropping vehicles is that their crews drop separately, and may be delayed or prevented from bringing them into action. Gliders allow crews to arrive at the drop zone along with their vehicles. They also minimize exposure of the valuable towing aircraft, which needn’t appear over the battlefield. So the Soviet Air Force ordered Oleg Antonov to design a glider for landing tanks.

Antonov was more ambitious, and instead of building a glider added a detachable cradle to a T-60 light tank, bearing large wood and fabric biplane wings and twin tail. Such a tank could glide into the battlefield, drop its wings, and be ready to fight within minutes.

Keeping and displaying a famous dead person’s body parts is not cool

Galileo’s 2 missing fingers and a tooth found. Admirers removed parts in 1737, which will be put on display, museum says

Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei’s corpse in a Florentine basilica in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found again and will soon be put on display, an Italian museum director said Friday.

Three fingers, a vertebra and a tooth were removed from the astronomer’s body by admirers in 1737, 95 years after his death, as his corpse was being moved from a storage place to a monumental tomb — opposite that of Michelangelo, in Santa Croce Basilica in Florence.

One of the fingers was recovered soon afterward and is now part of the collection of the Museum of the History of Science, in Florence. The vertebra has been kept at the University of Padua, where Galileo taught for years.

But the tooth and two fingers from the scientist’s right hand — the thumb and middle finger — were kept by one of the admirers, an Italian marquis, and later enclosed in a container that was passed on from generation to generation in the same family, Paolo Galluzzi, the museum’s director, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

“But with time, the generations lost knowledge of what was actually inside the container,” and the family sold it, Galluzzi said. By 1905, all traces of the relics had disappeared, “leading scholars to hypothesize that these singular specimens had been definitely lost,” the museum said in a statement.

via Galileo’s 2 missing fingers and a tooth found – Science- msnbc.com.

This is sick. They should bury poor Galileo’s remaining parts with the rest of him and honor his contributions to history.

Mysteriously warm times in Antarctica

Slice of ice core from Berkner Island, depth 120m. Trapped air bubbles (an archive of the past atmosphere) are visible in the ice. (Credit: Image courtesy of British Antarctic Survey)

A new study of Antarctica’s past climate reveals that temperatures during the warm periods between ice ages (interglacials) may have been higher than previously thought. The latest analysis of ice core records suggests that Antarctic temperatures may have been up to 6°C warmer than the present day.

The findings, recently reported by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Open University and University of Bristol in the journal Nature could help us understand more about rapid Antarctic climate changes.

Previous analysis of ice cores has shown that the climate consists of ice ages and warmer interglacial periods roughly every 100,000 years. This new investigation shows temperature ‘spikes’ within some of the interglacial periods over the last 340,000 years. This suggests Antarctic temperature shows a high level of sensitivity to greenhouse gases at levels similar to those found today.

Lead author Louise Sime of British Antarctic Survey said,

“We didn’t expect to see such warm temperatures, and we don’t yet know in detail what caused them. But they indicate that Antarctica’s climate may have undergone rapid shifts during past periods of high CO2.”

During the last warm period, about 125,000 years ago, sea level was around 5 metres higher than today.

Ice core scientist Eric Wolff of British Antarctic Survey is a world-leading expert on past climate. He said,

“If we can pin down how much warmer temperatures were in Antarctica and Greenland at this time, then we can test predictions of how melting of the large ice sheets may contribute to sea level rise.”

via Mysteriously warm times in Antarctica.

Crane wipes out house in tree battle

It was a test of strength that would top the bill of any sporting competition. The 150-year-old, 20ft oak vs the 50tonne, 90ft crane.

The young crane would have been firm favourite with the bookies but the mighty oak, though ageing and sickly, had one last fight in it – yanking the crane off its wheels and hurling the young pretender to the ground with the shudder of a mighty branch.

Alas, Kevin and Michelle McCarthy’s house stood underneath the titanic struggle. And, when part of the tree broke off, the crane was ‘shockloaded’ and promptly collapsed on the McCarthys’ home in Santa Rosa, California.

via Crane wipes out house in tree battle | Metro.co.uk.

Sting urges Brazil to listen to tribal dam fears

Rock star Sting has used his latest visit to Brazil to urge the government there to listen to the concerns of indigenous peoples over a proposed new hydro-electric dam in the Amazon.

He was speaking at a press conference in Sao Paulo where he was reunited with indigenous leader Raoni Metyktire who joined him in a similar campaign 20 years ago which attracted worldwide attention.

Indigenous tribes in the Amazon say the Belo Monte project, which would be the third largest hydro-electric dam in the world, poses a threat to their way of life. …

It proved to be an attention-grabbing combination of a rock star standing alongside the striking figure of an indigenous leader whose lower lip is expanded several centimetres by a traditional plate, a trademark of his tribe.

With renewed international attention on the cause of protecting the Amazon, the original hydro-electric project was abandoned, but now the Brazilian government is proposing a new scheme which they say is more environmentally friendly.

Critics have insisted the Belo Monte dam would still flood large areas of rainforest, have a major impact on fish stocks and undermine the way of life of thousands of indigenous people.

Speaking to the BBC, Sting said while the decision was for Brazilians alone, the debate had an impact far beyond South America’s largest country.

“This is the heart of the Amazon and what happens here affects the whole world,” he said.

“This was my intuition but now the science is backing that up, I mean substantial science is saying this is true.

“We need to save this forest.

via BBC News – Sting urges Brazil to listen to tribal dam fears.

Electric carmaker Tesla preparing to go public

U.S. electric sports car maker Tesla Motors plans to go public soon, two sources familiar with the matter said, amid growing interest in green technology and battery-powered vehicles.

An IPO filing from the six-year-old start-up, best known for its $109,000 all-electric Roadster, is expected any day, said one of the sources. The person did not give a specific time frame, although IPOs typically take several months.

Tesla spokesman Ricardo Reyes declined to comment on what he called “rumor or speculation.”

Tesla would mark the first public offering from a U.S. automaker since Henry Ford's Ford Motor Co debuted its shares in 1956. The IPO represents a landmark in the resurgence of electric car technology that most carmakers had dismissed as impractical until recently.

The company’s chairman Elon Musk said early last year that an IPO was a possibility in either late 2008 or 2009.

But the financial market turmoil following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in the latter half of 2008 virtually shut down the IPO market. The appetite for IPOs has picked up since mid-September this year with a robust pace of new filings.

Tesla’s IPO would follow the successful debut of lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems, whose shares rallied 50 percent on their first day of trading on Sept 25.

Analysts have said that the success of A123, the first green technology IPO this year, would encourage more venture capital-backed green companies to go public.

Tesla will compete with established automakers like Ford, General Motors and Nissan Motor Co, all of which are racing to launch electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles. Tesla, by contrast, is a small player with a high-end market and limited production.

A combination of factors has driven the recent interest in developing electric, or partially electric vehicles, including the Obama administration’s push to have one million rechargeable vehicles on US roads by 2015 and low-cost Department of Energy loans for manufacturers.

VENTURE FUNDS BACK GREEN CARS

The carmaker is developing a second, lower-cost model, an electric sedan known as the Model S, which will have a base price of $49,900.

via Electric carmaker Tesla preparing IPO: sources | U.S. | Reuters.