Politics

The worlds first gravity wave detector has been completed and is set to begin operations soon. The device consists of two installations, one in Louisiana and one in Washington state. Each installation has two 4km long vacuum tunnels into which lasers are fired and bounced off mirrors at the other end. The returning light beam is analyzed for disturbances. Dr Harry Ward explained "The effect of a gravitational wave - if you imagine it propagating towards you - would be to lengthen space between your head and feet, and contract your width. It distorts you in that way. "So the way we try to detect gravitational waves is to lay out, L-shape, a set of mirrors. The…

A nice little thread to post your favourite flag pictures onto. Popular with Americans this type of thing.

This evening President George W. Bush stated that he supported legislation that would ban all human cloning. This is a clear example of conservative religious politics being used to stifle science. It signals a growing rift between scientists and conservative politicians like Bush, who consult the Vatican on their policy for cloning.

James Shapiro from the U of Chicago will be doing an online chat called "How molecular biology opens up a 21st Century view of evolution" at the following URL on February 20th, 2003 at 2pm Eastern. http://www.iscid.org/james-shapiro.php

With the economy deteriorating and crime levels rising ..do u think we should go in for war? The consequences are too horrific to even think about.Saddam Hussain has a reputation equivalent to that of Hitler.If nuclear weapons are going to be used the destruction caused will exceed it's limit and the after effects of nuclear war will be evident in the future generations.Take Hiroshima and Nagasaki for example.The president should not panic all of a sudden about that Bin Laden guy.. because terrorists love to see people in panic and distress and they have fun at innocent people's cost. I have lived in a place where terrorism was too high and i have come to the conclusion t…

Russian Scientists have announced that they have found living cells from a frozen mammoth. The cells could provide the DNA scientists need to bring the ice-aged creature back. The cells, which were obtained from the mammoth's thigh, are "conditionally alive". Full article here.

...slowly but surely. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2757923.stm

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Is he the Invisible Man? It looks like as if three men walking behind are seen through the body of graduate student Kazutoshi Obana during a demonstration of optical camouflage technology at Tokyo University on Wednesday. The demonstration conducted by Professor of Engineering Susumu Tachi is an early stage of his research that he hopes will eventually render camouflaged objects virtually transparent by wearing an optical device. The photo was taken through a viewfinder that combines moving images from behind and in front of Obana, who was wearing a luminous jacket to create the transparent effect. The technology could prove useful…

A new ultra-low reflection substance has been developed for use in space telescopes. Apparently it is 10-20 times less reflective than matt black paint. "It's the blackest surface commercially available," [Dr Richard Brown] told BBC News Online. "It's a very interesting surface to look at because it's so black." Well duh. The coating is made of an alloy of nickel and phosphorus pitted with tiny curved craters which absorb light. Link here (here's another link with some more detail and a photo)

Brandon Vedas, 21, died online trying to impress his IRC buddies in a 'shroom channel by consuming a cocktail of various drugs that was far beyond lethal doses. Users in the channel egged him on, encouraging him to take different drugs for the webcam, while watching the 'show' on his website. BBC article is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2724819.stm IRC logs from the channel are here: http://pages.sbcglobal.net/oea/logs.html Update (fafalone):And here, the page originally linked to was shut down; I recovered the partial log from google caches, but if anyone has the complete thing that was originally posted, send it to me or post an address.

Italian surgeons have performed the first every full jaw transplant in an 11 hour surgery. An 80 year old man who suffers from a cancerous tumor of the mouth received the jaw bone from a donor, and membrane from the patient's arm was used to recreate his gums. You can find the full article here.

Thursday January 23, 09:03 AM Clonaid Release Details Of Third Baby A company linked to a cult that believes aliens created life on Earth is to announce details of a third baby allegedly born using cloning techniques. Clonaid company president Brigitte Boisselier is to hold a news conference in Canada, where she will talk about an cloned boy born to a Japanese couple.The company grabbed the headlines last month when it claimed to have produced the world's first cloned human, a baby girl - "Eve" - who was allegedly born on Boxing Day. But Eve has never been produced or been made available for independent tests. Yesterday, the vice president of Clonaid, Thomas Kaenz…

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NASA lost contact with the orbiter during this morning around 9 am when the shuttle was scheduled to land. Search and rescue teams have been activated in Dallas and Fort Worth. 'Columbia was at an altitude of 200,700 feet over north-central Texas at a 9 a.m., traveling at 12,500 mph when mission control lost contact and tracking data. ' Update (fafalone): Wreckage from the shuttle continues to fall; there is no hope of crew survival from that altitude. A news conference is scheduled for 3PM. It may take days to ascertain what specifically went wrong, however there is some speculation that it may have been caused by a piece of fuel tank insulation that struck the le…

In about a week the U.S. is going to expose "proof" they have against Saddam. What kind of proof do you think it will be? Satellite photos Spy Planes Speculation Spies inside the country Defective officials

Perceiving color is a feat generally taken for granted, but now scientists have begun to identify what part of our brain is responsible for this amazing feat. Publishing in the January 30th, 2003 issue of the British journal Nature, University of Texas-Houston Medical School researcher Youping Xiao and colleagues report on the organization of cells in the brain that respond to color. The experiment was carried out using macaque monkeys, whose blood flow to various areas of the brain was monitors while they were shown colors by using tracers injected into their system. The neurons were part of what are called cytochrome oxidase stripes. Multiple trials were conducted space…

According to this article, NASA will use nuclear propulsion to send astronauts to Mars by 2010. Project Prometheus will take 2 months to arrive at Mars rather the 6 month trip the current space flight technology at 18,000mph would take. President Bush may announce the project in his upcoming State of the Union Addresse.

Scientists in China claim to have found fossil remains of a dinosaur called a "Microraptor" that likely glided from place to place. "As far as I'm concerned, these are authentic fossils. They've presented extra information to go over that hurdle," said Richard Prum, a University of Kansas bird evolution expert and author of a companion piece in Nature." These fossils could help refine the theory of how dinosaurs transitioned to birds. You can find the story here.

It's textbook astronomy. Planets form little by little, as material slowly congeals within the disk of gas, dust, and ice known to swaddle young stars. First, gravity gathers together bits of dust, which merge to form boulder-size bodies, which themselves coalesce into bigger and bigger objects. In about a million years, these form rocky planets, like Earth and Mars. Over the next few million years, gas from the disk settles around some of these solid bodies, and they grow far bigger, becoming giants like gaseous Saturn and Jupiter. http://www.sciencenews.org/20030125/bob9.asp

Large portions of the Internet today were extremely slow or completely inaccessible as a virus similar to Code Red attacked. The virus exploited security holes in Microsoft SQL server. The slowdown of the Internet arose from the agressive victim scanning of the virus, sending out thousands of probes each second. It has overwhelmed alot of backbones. Update: It appears like Microsoft's own networks were hit hard by these attacks. Now they see first hand how insecure their products are. Source: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/5030801.htm

Three-dimensional tubes of living tissue have been printed using modified desktop printers filled with suspensions of cells instead of ink. The work is a first step towards printing complex tissues or even entire organs. The printers are adapted by washing out the ink cartridges and refilling them with suspensions of, say, cells. The software that controls the viscosity, electrical resistances and temperature of the printing fluids is reprogrammed and the feed systems altered. Full story here.

According to NewScientist, NASA is developing a fusion drive that theoretically can provide 300 times the thrust of any chemical rocket engine, while only using a fraction of its fuel mass. If successful, the new engine could cut the travel time to Mars from 6 months to nearly 6 weeks. NASA engineers plan to use microwaves to heat the plasma to 600 million kelvin, which would generate charged alpha particles, helium nuclei. A magnetic nozzle would then channel these particles and use them for thrust. You can find the full article here.

As Nature.com recently reported, scientists, using Super High Powered X-Rays, have discovered how insects breathe. The system is comprised of tracheae that run throughout the insect's body, which become smaller as they branch off, and ultimately vent through what's known as spiracles. This is a huge breakthough in the study of insects, but unknown is what further discoveries will pursue. Full article here. Also See ScienceMag

As reported in Nature Science Update, the European Astrophysical Virtual Observatory is scheduled to open today. For those not familiar with the project, it combines that power of 6 astronomy centers and makes data from all of them, including visual, gamma-ray, X-ray and radio-wave images of stars, galaxies, supernovae, black holes and gamma-ray busts available over the internet for astronmers to examine and cross-reference. This will also give us a more detailed view of the skies that ever before possible. See also http://www.euro-vo.org/

Six Magellanic penguins from Sea World were brought in to San Francisco Zoo, and apparently these penguins convinced the other 46 to swim in circles with them all day long. All 52 penguins just swim in circles non-stop all day until they get out of the water at dusk. This is a interesting, albeit weird, illustration of the social and inquisitive nature of penguins. CNN story