TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Learning Fat-Burning Secrets from Sled Dogs With tongue and tail wagging wildly, Larry the lead dog crossed the finish line in March in sunny Nome, Alaska--after running 1,131 miles to win the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race for the third year in a row. To most mortals, Larry looks like a happy but nondescript, scrawny mutt. To sled dog mushers, he is a mini legend that simply needs no introduction. To scientists, Larry may hold the key to a physiological mystery.Specifically, sled dogs seem to flip an internal switch that acutely changes how they burn fat calories, allowing them to keep going and going and going with no obvious pain. Figuring out how that mechanism works may have implications for human diabetics and those battling obesity. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Paperless Books: E-Paper Makes Headway Electronic-book readers such as Sony’s Digital Reader and Amazon’s Kindle have their fans, but the displays are difficult to read in sunlight and do not show colors well. A new kind of electronic paper could make the readers brighter and more colorful, which is of interest to conservationists who would like to see the devices replace paper editions.The prototype is an “electrofluidic display” built by the University of Cincinnati’s Novel Devices Laboratory. Lead researcher Jason Heikenfeld says the display can create 1,000 colors, reflects about 55 percent of ambient light and could reach 85 percent reflectivity. Today’s commercial readers, which use a different screen technology, reflect about 40 percent of ambient light and become even dimmer when showing color images because filters must be added. [More] rss.sciam.com |
The Origin of Oxygen in Earth's Atmosphere It's hard to keep oxygen molecules around, despite the fact that it's the third-most abundant element in the universe, forged in the superhot, superdense core of stars. That's because oxygen wants to react; it can form compounds with nearly every other element on the periodic table. So how did Earth end up with an atmosphere made up of roughly 21 percent of the stuff? [More] rss.sciam.com |
Nerd a Vacation?: Travel with The Geek Atlas After five years of gallivanting across the globe, Charles Darwin settled down at Down House in Downe, England. Other than day trips to London, he hardly left his neighborhood for the remaining 45 years of his life. After three days at a conference in London this past summer, I took a day trip to Downe to see Darwin’s house, which is now a small museum. What I did not know at the time was that I was visiting site number 043 in The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science & Technology Come Alive (O’Reilly Media, 2009).Author John Graham-Cumming holds a doctorate in computer security and is described in the book as “a wandering programmer.” (That background probably explains the zeroes that give all his site numbers three digits. Not to mention the choice of 128 places--programmers can’t resist powers of 2.) Graham-Cumming secured his own geek status by contributing to Linux Magazine . And he became a supergeek with his previous book, published in 2008, a guide to the software program GNU Make. That’s right, Graham-Cumming is the author of GNU Make Unleashed , which, he notes, “saturated its target market of 100 readers.” [More] rss.sciam.com |
The Nuclear Doomsday Clock Still Ticks Early last October the Nobel Prize committee announced that it was awarding Barack Obama the Peace Prize for his “vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” At the same time, in counterpoint to that news, it was reported that the director of India’s 1998 nuclear testing program had called for new tests. That move provoked fears of escalation, in case it motivated Pakistan and China to recommence testing and made it even harder for the U.S. to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Although some 150 countries have ratified the treaty, neither the U.S., China nor India has yet done so.The chair of India’s Atomic Energy Commission has stated that his nation does not need to carry out any more tests; one can only hope that India’s policy makers agree and that by the time this essay appears, the world will not yet have taken one more step toward the brink. [More] rss.sciam.com |