Australian scientists aim to reduce sheep burps

“Australian scientists are working to breed a sheep that belches less, as they look for ways to reduce harmful methane emissions from the country’s woolly flocks…Twelve percent of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions originate with agriculture, and some 70 percent of that amount is blamed on ruminant livestock, with most of it coming from burps.”

Whether or not you think global warming is real, you gotta love it for providing news like this.

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Smart Phones Allow Quick Diagnosis of Acute Appendicitis
But will doctors text: “UR OK LOLz” and will carriers still charge 95 cents per incoming medical text?

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The Sapeurs of Congo: Open Gutters and Gucci Loafers, Héctor Mediavilla photos of Sapeurs

“The Sapeurs adhere to a subculture of high fashion, often against a backdrop of extreme poverty. Many live in shacks bordered by stinking sewers in the southern suburbs of Brazzaville [Congo]. Those of them who can work double jobs; those who can’t must beg, borrow and occasionally steal; whatever it takes to strut in Versace, Prada and Gucci…Within the SAPE movement there are rivalries and affiliations. Paris vs Brussels, Brazzaville vs Kinshasa, Bacongo vs Mungali. It is total fashion warfare.”

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Explanation for brain fart

“It turns out the root of these brain farts may be a special kind of abnormal brain activity that begins up to 30 seconds before a mistake even happens…The international team of researchers suspects this abnormal behavior is the result of the brain attempting to save effort on a task. When the brain goes too far, errors occur.”

Lazy brain!

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The dark side of the internet

“‘Many many users think that when they search on Google they’re getting all the web pages,’ says Anand Rajaraman…But Rajaraman knows different. ‘I think it’s a very small fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the surface. I don’t know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as big as the surface web is the only estimate I know.’”

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Study: Believers’ inferences about God’s beliefs are uniquely egocentric

“The final study involved functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the neural activity of test subjects as they reasoned about their own beliefs versus those of God or another person. The data demonstrated that reasoning about God’s beliefs activated many of the same regions that become active when people reasoned about their own beliefs.”

It turns out that god truly is inside each and every one of us.

Lose the fat: Targeting grease to curtail sewer overflows

At issue are overflows from “sanitary” sewer systems, as opposed to “combined” systems that also handle stormwater. EPA estimates that 40 percent of the 3 to 10 billion annual sanitary sewer overflows around the country are caused by hard deposits made up of fat, oil and grease (FOG) that clog sewage pipes.

Are these sanitary sewer problems being caused by the American diet? Too much FOGy food?

“We think a reaction takes place in the sewage collection system when FOG interacts with calcium or other metal ions to form these hardened deposits,” Ducoste says, “similar to the chemical reactions that are used to make household soaps.”

And now I’m thinking “free soap” which probably helps explain why I’m not a scientist while this guys is:

Ducoste says, “once we understand the chemistry behind these deposits, we can develop models to identify potential ‘hot spots’ where FOG deposits may form.” Identifying these hot spots will allow utilities to use preventative maintenance to avoid overflows. Perhaps more importantly, the models could serve as useful tools for urban planners – helping them determine whether an existing sewer system can sustain population growth, or if the system needs to be modified in order to accommodate future growth.

The urban planning component is essential, Ducoste says, because significant amounts of FOG get into sewage systems from high-density residential areas, such as apartment blocks and condominiums. Local governments need to be aware of potential sewer overflow problems that could stem from population growth in a concentrated area. Currently, sewage systems try to keep out FOG by using grease interceptors – but they are found only at restaurants.

NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) shows controversial phenomenon on the sun known as the “solar tsunami.”

The twin STEREO spacecraft confirmed their reality in February 2009 when sunspot 11012 unexpectedly erupted. The blast hurled a billion-ton cloud of gas (a coronal mass ejection, or CME) into space and sent a tsunami racing along the sun’s surface. STEREO recorded the wave from two positions separated by 90 degrees, giving researchers an unprecedented view of the event.

“It was definitely a wave,” says Spiros Patsourakos of George Mason University, lead author of a paper reporting the finding in Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Not a wave of water, but a giant wave of hot plasma and magnetism.”

The technical name is “fast-mode magnetohydrodynamical wave,” or “MHD wave” for short. The one STEREO saw reared up about 100,000 kilometers (62,000 miles) high, raced outward at 250 km/second (560,000 mph), and packed as much energy as 2400 megatons of TNT (1029 ergs).

Killer Bees Aren’t So Smart

So-called killer bees have readily displaced the long-established European honeybees throughout Central America and the southern United States. Yet the invaders don’t perform as well as invadees in lab tests of learning and memory, says behavioral ecologist Margaret Couvillon of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England.

An alternate hypothesis? Maybe killer bees are like most jocks who just sit through lab tests dreaming of the big game and cheerleaders.

“Perhaps learning has a cost,” Couvillon says. “If it were cost-free, wouldn’t we all be getting smarter?” She cites research on fruit flies that suggests investing in superior learning saps resources from other competitive abilities.

Which may explain why jocks are so good at stuffing freshmen into lockers all morning but then can’t recite the Emancipation Proclamation during their afternoon History class.

Couvillon tested bee learning using a long-standing protocol: puffing odors at bees before touching sugar water to their antennae. When researchers gave bees a second whiff, about half of European honeybees stuck out their tonguelike proboscises as soon as the odor wafted by again, anticipating another drop of sugar water. The bees acted like Pavlov’s dogs, drooling at the sound of a bell they associate with food, Couvillon says.

Research assistants prefer cleaning up after the bees – less doody.

Only about half as many killer bees picked up the association after a single trial, the researchers found. Even after three trials, about three quarters of the European honeybees were drooling at the odor but only half of the killer bees were.

Which goes to show that even jocks can learn, although they tend to focus their mental abilities more toward the nerd-locker stuffing and wedgie innovation side of things.

Plants prefer their kin, but crowd out competition when sharing a pot with strangers

Plants don’t mind sharing space with their kin but when they’re potted with strangers of the same species they start invigorating their leaves, a study by McMaster University reveals.

As soon as I hear the word “kin” I imagine the plants are like the Hatfields and the McCoys a feudin’ – throwing elbows and slinging iron. And doesn’t “invigorating their leaves” sound like such a wonderful euphemism?

“This supports previous research that plants are capable of complex social behaviour and will exhibit altruistic behaviour, giving their siblings a competitive edge in the wild,” says Murphy.

Just how insufferable will M. Night Shyamalan be if it turns out he was right?

“Rejecta Mathematica is an open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences.”

Jumping spiders apparently use blood as a perfume to attract the opposite sex.

Spiders that dined on blood-fed mosquitoes were sexier to members of the opposite sex — other spiders spent four times as much time closer to a vent carrying scent gently blown off them. When spiders on non-blood diets were switched to blood-fed mosquitoes, they became more attractive, and the opposite was true when spiders were changed to blood-free diets.

Fraud, Errors and Misconceptions in Medical Research

More importantly, will the study that studied the studies turn out to be in the 1/3 or 2/3 pile?

A study in 2005, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that one-third of all medical studies turn out to be wrong.

I guess those are still better-than-chance odds.

Sensory deprivation can produce hallucinations in only 15 minutes. Which, I beileve, may make a lot of drug users very happy what with the street price of drugs constantly increasing along with unemployment these days.

The researchers, from the University College, London, placed the volunteers one at a time into an anechoic chamber. The chamber had thick outer walls, inner walls of metallic acoustic panels, and a layer of fiberglass sandwiched between them, and completely dampened sound to below the threshold of hearing, and also blocked out all light.

See? The authors of the article were even kind enough to specify how to create your own sensory deprivation chamber.

The subject sat in a padded chair in the sensory deprivation room for 15 minutes, during which time many of the subjects reported hallucinations, a depressed mood or paranoia.

And the pièce de résistance? You get to sit in a comfy chair the entire time! No more roaming the streets at 2:00 in the morning while you’re jonesin’ for a fix, all you have to do now is walk down the hall to your very own anechoic chamber and you’ll be seeing the sights in under a quarter hour.

It’s about time clowns were used in scientific research.

Recently researchers decided to put the theory of “inattentional blindness” to the test: the unicycling clown test. They documented real-world examples of people who were so distracted by their cell phone use that they failed to see the bizarre occurrence of a unicycling clown passing them on the street.

Although, even around 50% of people without cell phones failed to see the unicycling clown, which begs the question: just what the heck are people thinking about?

Compared with individuals walking alone, in pairs, or listening to their ipod, cell phone users were the group most prone to oblivious behavior: only twenty-five percent of them noticed the unicycling clown. The walkers not using a cell phone noticed the clown over fifty-percent of the time.

Furthermore, the cell phone users had difficulties performing even the simple task of walking, an action that should require relatively few cognitive resources. They walked more slowly, changed direction more often, were prone to weaving, and acknowledged other individuals more rarely.

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