Robin Weiss, a virologist at University College London, had an intimate revelation in the shower recently.
Public hair, he decided, developed as a sexual ornament. It became bushy and prominent after our ancestors split from non-human primates, he says, when we lost most of our other body hair. As it disappeared, human pubic hair acquired a new role as a prominent sexual ornament, a visual signal of sexual maturity and possibly a reservoir for sexual pheromones.
The bushier and coarser it became, according to Weiss's theory, the more attractive you were.
I like swords, but I couldn't eat a whole one. Not like Dan Meyer, who swallowed three whole swords in front of a crowd at London's Wellcome Collection last night.
Meyer is president of Sword Swallowers Association International (slogan: "sword swallowers do it to the hilt"). He's been swallowing swords professionally for about 10 years and holds the world record for underwater sword swallowing in a tank of sharks and stingrays. I kid you not.
Digging around in the backyard, age 10 or so, what did you put in your time capsule? I might have buried a Vanessa Paradis tape and my brother's water gun. I didn't have an elephant's tooth, which is what the Zoological Society of London put in theirs this morning before burying it.
The idea of time capsules is to give future generations a glimpse into the past. If you're more realistically inclined, the idea is to give you something to reminesce about when you dig out the old rusted cookie tin 50 years later (or six months later, which is as long as most kids can last). The scientists at ZSL say there's a chance that children today will outlive some endangered species, and generations to come might like to know about the incredible creatures that roamed the earth, once upon a time.
There is a slight irony to the story, given that zoos recently came under fire for "consuming" more elephants than they generate through their mating schemes.
Under intense lobbying pressure from her daughters, as well as senator Ted Kennedy, Michelle Obama has set a date for the appointment of the First Dog, and announced the breed.
The Obamas are going for a Portuguese water dog, which apparently have good temperaments. Kennedy has two. They don't shed their hair, so are considered hypoallergenic, which is a factor for allergy-sufferer Malia Obama.
Projecting an image of the scene behind you onto yourself can make for an impressive invisibility effect (with video), but the Japanese researchers pioneering that technology use a lot of custom-built kit.
This enterprising Halloween party goer has achieved a limited version of the same effect, by strapping a digital camera to his back and a portable DVD player to his front. The result is a scary illusion of a gaping hole in his abdomen.
"I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based
cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable
energy in America," he said.
Noting that the economic downturn meant government needed to cut some budgets, but boost spending elsewhere Obama said: "It begins with energy." He then went on to acknowledge that other nations, including China, Germany and Japan, are quietly leading the new energy revolution:
After NASA's $273 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory failed to reach orbit on Tuesday, some of us at New Scientist started to wonder if the choice of launch vehicle was the problem. After all, the Taurus launcher hasn't flown in nearly five years, and one of its previous seven launches failed in 2001.
The failure of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) is a loss to climate science, but that loss could be doubly compounded if engineers can't correct what went wrong in time for NASA's next climate satellite to fly later this year.
That satellite, known as the Glory mission, is currently set to launch in November, but it's now on hold pending the results of the OCO investigation. Whereas OCO was built to measure greenhouse gases, Glory is designed to study the effects of aerosols on clouds. This has been called the "missing link" of climate science, and it's information that is needed as soon as possible to refine global climate models.
It's well known that clouds reflect sunlight, which has a net effect of making the Earth cooler. It's also known that minute particles called aerosols often become the nuclei around which water droplets form in clouds. But what nobody understands is exactly how much humans are affecting the clouds with all the aerosols we generate through combustion, agriculture and other dust-raising activities.
So a delay in getting Glory off the ground means a delay in filling in this crucial piece of the climate puzzle. But wait - it gets worse.
I like the way this MIT team have demonstrated the compact and simple design of their mini plasma thruster - by making a version from a soft drink bottle and coke can.
Project leader Oleg Batishchev says they can go even further:
"This shows that this is a robust, simple design. So in principal, an even simpler design could be developed." It will be interesting to see just how much simpler it can get. Read on to see the video.
Al Gore got a certain amount of grief for suggesting in his docu-film An Inconvenient Truth that hurricane Katrina was linked to climate change. As regular readers will know, it is notoriously difficult to blame greenhouse gas emissions for any single natural disaster, even though there's a broad consensus among climate scientists that climate change will increase the frequency, intensity, and consequences of natural disasters.
The key is the name: most natural disasters are not man-made, although they can be triggered by human activity (for examples see Five ways to trigger a natural disaster). While greenhouse gas emissions are unlikely to be the only cause of a hurricane, drought, or flood, they can make an event more or less likely to happen.
...Well, not the rooftops so much as from our offices in London, Boston, San Francisco and Melbourne. And from the labs, lectures and scientific conferences around the world. Whereever, in fact, there is something happening in the world of science, we'll be there to report it. In 140 words or less.
That's right - we're on Twitter. Sign up to follow our microblogs here, and stay in touch with breaking news on the happening science and technology stories from around the world.
Brian Weeden is a technical consultant at the Secure World Foundation and a former orbital analyst at the US Strategic Command's Joint Space Operations Center
Knowledge is the key to everything, and that truism was proved yet again in the causes behind the first collision between two satellites, which occurred on 10 February. None of the parties involved - the US military, Iridium LLC, and Russia - seems to have had any warning or knowledge about the incident beforehand. Yet at least one party, the US military, had the information that could have provided a warning, had it simply been looked at. All parties also knew about the risk of collision in that region of Earth orbit.
Another truism, that knowledge is power, contributed greatly to the satellite collision. The importance of space situational awareness (SSA), knowledge about the locations of satellites in Earth orbit and the risks to them, has been known since Sputnik and significant SSA capabilities have been developed since then. But these capabilities have been the domain of militaries, organisations that are infamous for hoarding information and preventing its dissemination because of its implications for power.
The best satellite catalogue in the world, and thus knowledge about what's going on in Earth orbit, is maintained by the US military. The Russian military probably maintains the second-best catalogue in the world, at least for low-Earth orbit. Yet neither of these two militaries had any warning about this collision, because both have put the security of information, and thus power, above the safety of satellites in Earth orbit.
You don't expect to learn about vampires at a forensics meeting, but they were a hot topic of conversation at the American Academy of Forensics annual meeting in Denver last week.
When British boy band Busted sang
"I've been to the year 3000 /
Not much has changed but they lived underwater / And your great, great, great granddaughter
/ Is pretty fine"
they probably weren't expecting any scientists to back them up.
But a report (pdf) to be presented to a group of MPs early next month by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) suggests that the boys' predictions might not be far wrong, at least as far as living underwater is concerned.
New Scientist has covered the questions raised by the the increasing autonomy of military robots for many years. See here and here for two of our most popular articles on the subject.
But you can have a laugh about war robots too. What better to demonstrate that than Jon Stewart's inimitable Daily Show, where two of the top thinkers on military robotics - Colin Angle who builds war robots at iRobot and Noel Sharkey robo-ethicist at Sheffield University - gamely do battle with an eccentric interviewer.
Click below to see the clip. I think you'll agree, they are both sporting guys.
Hothouse, snowball, slushball, greenhouse - all terms that have been used to describe the various climatic state of our planet. Here's a new one: Sauna Earth.
On a wet planet like ours, warmer temperatures naturally lead to more humid conditions. And because water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas, a more humid Earth should also be a warmer one. This is what's known as the water vapour feedback (it's what's thought to contribute to the faster-than-average warming in the Arctic).
Models and theory show it should happen, but observational data to back up the theory has been scarce. No longer.
In a previous post about fears over Google's service to let people know your location in real time, I pointed out that people already routinely share their past and even future location on more established social services.
Now, in this interesting post, Matt Jones of travel itinerary sharing site Dopplr suggests that "where you are right now has limited value."
He thinks that it is discussions of what happened at locations you were at in the past, and the places you may end up at in the near future and what may happen there, that are much more interesting.
That's an interesting take on the question of location sharing. If he's right, then providing real-time location may be the last thing that Google's new platform is used for.
Instead, services using it could be more concerned with tracking your past locations and predicting future ones.
Apparently, social networking sites reduce the amount of face-to-face contact we experience, leading to changes to our hormonal activity and our genetics, and thus to an increased risk of cancer - and, presumably, a fall in house prices.
Naturally, the operative word in that headline is "could".
He looked forward to the time, in the near future, when we'll be able to image Earth-like planets - he compared this to spotting a firefly next to a searchlight - and wondered about alien life in the wider universe.
But in his conclusion he got into truly cosmic realms, by offering his answer to a question he is often asked: Does astronomy offer any special extra perspective on our terrestrial lives?
Things just aren't like the old days - especially when it comes to solving murders.
Michael Baden, chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police and presenter of HBO's Autopsy complains that the murder solve rate was 80% when he embarked upon his career in the 1960s, but today just 50% of murders in the US get solved, despite great leaps forward in terms of forensics - including DNA testing.
Baden, who has worked on a number of high profile cases including the deaths of Sid Vicious and John Belushi, and the trials of O.J. Simpson and Phil Spector, attributes at least some of this to modern policing methods. These chain police officers to their desks rather than pushing them out on the streets.
Ten months after coming in dead last in a NASA review of space missions, Gravity Probe B has been bailed out by angel philanthropists, the New York Times reported on Monday.
This is largely thanks to the efforts of principal investigator Francis Everitt of Stanford University, who has been pulling out all the stops to keep the probe's mission alive. Everitt raised $500,000 from the son of a former mentor, and $2.7 million through a member of the royal family of Saudi Arabia, which is interested in gaining mission experience by partnering with NASA, the article reports. That should be enough to keep analysis going on data from the probe, which was launched in 2004 and began making useful measurements in 2005, at until 2010 at least.
And just as sure as night follows day, a spoiler report (pdf format) appears from Friends of the Earth contradicting everything in the ISAAA report. You'll be delighted to know that this year is no exception. As a journalist trying to find out what the real picture is, I find the whole pantomime intensely frustrating.
Do I believe the Biotech Evangelists, whose objective is to show GM crops in their best possible light, and to portray them as an unstoppable force for good? Or do I believe the Green Fundamentalists, who will never say a good thing about GM crops even if the evidence is staring them in the face, because they're ideologically opposed to them?
Last month, jetpacks made it onto the New Scientist sci-fi technology wishlist, with the usual caveats that it is hard to strap enough fuel to a person to keep them airborne for more than about 30 seconds.
In the meantime, perhaps a water-powered jetpack can provide some
of the same thrills with less risk of injury - crashes will be wet, but
potentially less painful. The Jetlev Flyer can send the rider 50 feet into the air and has a top speed of 30 mph. Check out the video below to see it in action.
Some people never forget a face. But new research suggests that people can be duped into recalling faces they've never seen. Soldiers training under conditions simulating capture prove even more susceptible.
One challenge facing the search for extra-terrestrial life is
that it relies on looking for signatures of life that's reliant on
water and biomolecules common to all known life.
This is a wise approach, yet how might scientists find life
as we don't know it -- organisms whose habitat and biochemistry bust the mold
of all terrestrial life?
Paul Davies, an astrobiologist at Arizona State University,
speculated today at AAAS that such weird life might already exist on Earth.
Finding it, he said, could help solve a long-standing question in astrobiology:
How common is life in the universe?
"The statistics of one don't tell us a great deal," he said.
My climate guilt is complete. Not only did I expand my personal carbon footprint by flying from California to attend the AAAS meeting, but yesterday I ordered a cheeseburger on room service at my hotel here in Chicago.
My guilt trip stems from the fact that cheeseburgers are among the most climate-unfriendly foods imaginable, as multiple speakers reminded me this morning at a AAAS session on "life-cycle assessments" of the total greenhouse gases emitted in putting food on our plates.
Labradoodles, golden doodles and other designer dogs may be
relatively new to the kennel, but dog breeders produce these animals through a
decidedly old school approach: Introduce a golden retriever to a poodle and let
nature take its course.
But new discoveries in dog genetics could provide dog
breeders with far more control in selecting for traits such as size, colour,
perhaps even temperament.
Thanks to a fully sequenced dog genome and genetic tools that allow researchers to rapidly scan hundreds of thousands of gene mutations at once, geneticists have uncovered a handful of genes that determine coat colour, variations in size, as well as some congenital diseases.
Go -- the Asian board game once thought too complex for computers to master -- is finally succumbing to silicon power. Today at AAAS, a computer program bested an American professional.
The loser, James Kerwin, played against an opponent with a sizable handicap, but computer programs are getting better by the week, says Robert Hearn, a mathematician at Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire. Based on predictable advances in computing power, he rockons that a program will beat the best professional Go players on even footing within 28 years.
"A lot of people have thought of Go as the last bastion of
human superiority over computers, at least as far as board games go," Hearn said. "Previous to this no one would have imagined that a computer would be
able to beat a professional."
As a former molecular biologist now working as a biology reporter, my focus at this meeting has been almost exclusively on the life sciences. I should spread my wings as a reporter and cover talks on physics, astronomy and climate. Maybe tomorrow.
For now, I'll pass on a link to an excellent post on the odds of finding more earths, written by former New Scientist opinion editor, Jo Marchant. She reports on a talk by Alan Boss, an astronomer and planet-hunter at the Carnegie Institution of Washington:
"Life is so tenacious and hard to stop," he told the press conference. He reiterated the point Anthony Remijan made here yesterday, that comets continually carry rich mixtures of prebiotic organic molecules onto the surface of planets. "If a habitable planet is sitting around a star for billions of years - something is going to come up."
I loathe eggs. The slightest whiff of hard-boiled egg is enough to make me feel ill. Yet I've never gotten sick from eggs, to the best of my knowledge, and I remember enjoying them as a kid -- the runnier the better.
I've always wondered how I could have possibly developed this aversion, and after hearing psychologist Elizabeth Loftus speak today at AAAS, I think I have an answer. False memories.
In the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals -- the neglected step-child of Charles Darwin's trifecta of treatises -- the father of evolution theorised that emotion and compassion were universal and naturally selected features of humans.
While traveling around the world aboard the HMS Beagle, Darwin was struck by the fact that he could understand facial expressions of people from different cultures, but not their languages or gestures. Darwin also believed that our sense of moral compassion came from a natural desire to alleviate the suffering of others. He was an ardent abolitionist.
Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has authored an introduction to Expressions of the Emotions, said today at a AAAS press conference that these views are nearly identical to those of Tibetan Buddhists.
"I am now calling myself a Darwinian," Ekman recalled the Dalai Lama saying, after Ekman read him some passages of Darwin's work.
Ekman said he spent two full days in deep conversation with the Dalai Lama, resulting in a treatise of his own. He argues through several lines of evidence that Darwin's views on emotion and compassion were inspired directly by Tibetan Buddhism.
"There's always the possibility that two wise people looking at the same species for long enough are going to come to the same conclusion," he said. Ekman thinks otherwise.
He bristled at requests to elaborate more on his ideas until his talk later today. I'll try to attend that session and provide an update.Â
But Ekman did make one thing clear: "I'm not saying that Darwin was a Buddhist." Rather, he took intellectual inspiration in some aspects of the religion.
(images courtesy Wikimedia Commons and Luca Galuzzi)
Al Gore told an audience of thousands of scientists what they already knew last night during his AAAS address: that global warming is a real phenomenon, that human carbon emissions are contributing to it, and that the planet could change drastically as a result.
Weighing in at up to 6800 kilograms, African elephants tend to go where they want. This can be a problem if they wander outside of government-protected parks, where they're vulnerable to poachers and bothersome to farmers -- neither afraid to pull pull the trigger.
Now, researchers have found that elephants can be coaxed toward or away from sounds that mimic the elephant's own communications, and they're testing the approach in Namibia's Etosha National Park.
If women were interested in little more than showy displays,
sports car-driving men would get all the women, no matter how boring,
self-centered and dumb they are. Never mind other inferiorities they might be
compensating for.
Similarly, male birds need more than a flashy tail or a nice
call to woo females, says Gail Patricelli, a behavioural ecologist at the
University of California, Davis. Nowhere is this more true than among birds that
perform intricate mating dances, where males must cater to a female's desires.
New experiments with robotic female birds suggest that the
best male lovers listen to females and adjust their courtship similarly.
Covering AAAS is a little like flipping
through television. You often stumble on interesting programs midway through an
episode and spend the next 15 minutes playing catch up.
This morning, I wandered into a session on
the evolution of women, just as Carol Ward, a paleontologist at the University
of Missouri, asked the audience why human females don't have puny brains.
From an evolutionary standpoint, it might
make sense for women to devote their cellular efforts to reproduction instead of
developing an energy-hogging brain, Ward suggested. Females of plenty of other
species make this compromise, so why not humans?
Chimpanzees are even smarter than humans than previously thought -- at least at memorizing numbers.
A cunning eight-year old chimpanzee named Ayumu can memorize a brief flash of up to eight numerals on a computer screen, according to new research presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science today. Humans who practice the task max out at six numbers, says Tetusuro Matsuzawa, a primatologist at Kyoto University in Japan, who trained Ayumu and 13 other gifted chimps.
"Not many people are happy to see that chimps are better than us," he says.
Creationists staging a protest outside London's Natural History Museum yesterday couldn't spoil the party atmosphere as hundreds gathered to celebrate Darwin's 200th birthday - especially when there was specially brewed Natural Selection beer to help the mood.
The booze has been brewed by the aptly named Darwin Brewery who have also composed this limerick:
Charles Darwin was deep in reflection On the fossils within his collection When you sit down and think You need a long drink - Beer is the Natural Selection!
The effects of climate change may be even more devastating for marine species than for those on land. That is the message from conservation biologists gathered at the AAAS meeting in Chicago.
Still, the latest projections for the world's marine fish, revealed at the AAAS by William Cheung of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, gave me pause for thought.
Primatologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University is at the AAAS meeting promoting his provocative idea: that a switch to cooked food, which occurred with the emergence of Homo erectus around 1.8 million years ago, was a pivotal event in human evolution, leading to bigger brains, smaller teeth and reduced gut size.
Last year Wrangham showed that modern apes have an innate preference for cooked food, arguing that our ancestors would have behaved in exactly the same way. Anthropologists weren't entirely convinced that this was a clinching argument, but Wrangham is now back with more evidence to bolster his case.
His latest work documents the energetic benefits obtained by cooking, which softens foods by breaking down hard-to-digest starch and proteins. "Softness is energy," he told reporters at the AAAS.
One cosmos carried a seemingly plausible plot to destroy the Vatican with "a bomb of unstoppable power" based on antimatter. This universe was populated with two stellar objects, Hollywood actor Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard.
The second consisted of a mysterious brotherhood of scientists who lurk in a subterranean lab. Represented by Rolf Landau of CERN, they are racing to crack an enduring mystery - why the cosmos is badly lacking in antimatter, the ultimate "Alice in Wonderland" material.
The two universes encountered each other today at CERN, the 27-kilometre-circumference particle smasher near Geneva that straddles the French and Swiss borders.
Children from richer families tend to do better in school, and some of that edge may arise through an unexpected mechanism, according to research presented at the AAAS meeting by psychologists at the University of Chicago.
It turns out that mothers with higher socioeconomic status communicate more through gestures with toddlers, which seems to give them a larger vocabulary when they turn up in school at between 4 and 5 years of age.
Susan Goldin-Meadow and Meredith Rowe have studied 50 families from all levels of Chicago society, from households earning less than $15,000 a year to those bringing in more than $100,000. They observed 49 mothers (and one dad) interacting with their 14-month-old children at home for 90 minutes, recording the number of gestures with distinct meanings.
I'm in Chicago for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. So at a press breakfast with its president, Harvard University biological oceanographer James McCarthy, I took the opportunity to ask him about the science spending in the economic stimulus package emerging from the US Congress.
President Barack Obama knows that his political fortunes are now tied to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as the stimulus package is formally known, which he is banking on to revive the sagging US economy.
So, to a lesser extent, are the causes that will receive billions of dollars under the bill. And science is right in there, getting more than $15 billion in a compromise version thrashed out yesterday by members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, according to a fast-reaction analysis from the lobby group Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA). "Science wins!" shouts SEA's home page.
A strange bit of political skullduggery came to light yesterday. An employee of the main UK opposition party, the Conservatives, altered an entry on Wikipedia to back up an attack the party's leader had made on Prime Minister Gordon Brown in parliament.
But although UK politics emerges from the event looking rather tarnished, the community-generated encyclopaedia may actually benefit.
Tonight I'll be eating my way through four billion years of evolution as I join 300 other guests at the Melbourne Museum, Australia, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.
Presumably tonight's hors d'oeuvres will be unicellular, RNA-based, microscopic, and exceedingly difficult to juggle with a glass of wine. What will come next? Multiple fish dishes, representing the 3.5 billion years life spent in water before emerging on to land?
Poor ET. Anytime something mysterious goes wrong on Earth, a light-tipped finger of suspicion tends to point straight at little green men. But their good name has been cleared in at least one recent case. Read more...
"What we mean by evolution is the world as created by God."
Did I say this? No. It was reportedly said on Tuesday by none other than Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Culture. In effect, the Roman Catholic Church, the dominant Christian faith, is saying that Darwin's theory of evolution is compatible with Christian faith.
After all these years, even the Pope and his pals are on-message, Darwin-wise. At least the admission came a bit sooner than for poor old Galileo, but better late than never.
Furthermore, they're going to be discussing the relationship between evolution and faith next month in Rome at a special conference to mark the 150th Anniversary of Darwin's Origin of Species which, as we know, changed forever our views about how we came to be here on this little planet.
A shock absorber for goods vehicles that generates power with every bump strikes me as a good idea, and has also impressed the firm that makes jeeps for the US Army.
GenShock is also a neat complement to a plan we wrote about in December to trial energy harvesting roads in Israel, which generate power from the vibrations made by vehicles rumbling overhead.
While campaigning in Florida, Barack Obama pledged to make NASA a priority. But the new president has made no public pronouncements regarding the fate of the ageing space shuttle, despite the fact that the shuttle's retirement date made the list of urgent decisions awaiting the new administration. Currently, the shuttle is set to retire in 2010, leaving a five-year gap before its replacement will be ready.
NASA is also still headless; no one has yet been nominated to replace Mike Griffin, who stepped down from the helm last month.
While there may be a NASA news vacuum surrounding the White House, the agency hasn't been forgotten on Capitol Hill. If the Senate has its way, NASA will get $1.3 billion in additional funding over the next year and a half, some of which could be used to close the gap in US space access.
"Why are modern scientists so dull?" asks Bruce Charlton, a professor of theoretical medicine at Buckingham University, UK, and author of a provocative new essay of the same title.
By rewarding researchers who take few intellectual risks but produce consistent, yet incremental advances, science is alienating brilliant mavericks who have the brains and vision to produce "revolutionary science," he argues. That makes them dull.
Charlton is Editor-in-Chief of Medical Hypotheses, a journal that doesn't let data get in the way of a good theory. Its papers often connect two distinct phenomena with the flimsiest of evidence - and sometimes we've had fun reporting on their stuff. But I must protest at a supposed link between scientists and intellectual ennui.
Yesterday evening I made sure that I was home in time to sprawl in front of the TV and watch the UK body makeover programme, Ten Years Younger.
The formula is simple: woman puts herself forward for body remake (or is sometimes nominated by friends and family); public guesses her age (always older than her real years, sometimes nightmarishly so); woman gets total makeover; public and family gasp; public votes again - wow, you look "ten years younger" - or more. The End.
Do I wish it was me getting the makeover? You bet.
Is there anything wrong with that? You bet, says psychotherapist Susie Orbach.
You might be forgiven for thinking that an environment minister would agree with the consensus view on climate change. The man who holds the title in Northern Ireland has sparked the fury of environmentalists by calling for government advertisements to be banned.
Northern Ireland's environment minister Sammy Wilson said the ads were part of an "insidious propaganda campaign that we are responsible for climate change".
Saturday morning in Melbourne, Australia. We hunkered down at home, with blinds drawn to keep the extreme weather out, every so often peeking out the window to see where the garden thermometer had got to.
By midday the thermometer showed 40 °C. As it climbed relentlessly to 41, 42, 43, 44, reaching 47 by teatime, excitement quickly shifted to foreboding. Humidity was low too: a mere 4% - making your skin prickle - compared to a more usual 30%. Add fierce, hot winds that whipped at the windows, and you will have an idea of the "perfect storm" conditions that led to what may be the worst bushfires in Australia's history.
At the time of writing, the army has been called in to help fight bushfires still burning out of control, over 700 homes have been destroyed - many in Melbourne's commuter belt - and more than 330,000 hectares burnt.
After spending a week in the French town of Chamonix thrashing out technical and logistical arguments (and fitting in the odd afternoon of skiing), 120 or so physicists from the CERN laboratory near Geneva have recommended a schedule for the restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Here in the UK, people have always taken weather forecasts with a pinch of salt, particularly since the Met Office failed to predict a hurricane-force storm in 1987. The exact nature of this unreliability has still always been unclear: was that just an unfortunate fluke mistake, or are forecasters consistently wrong?
A new study in the American Meteorological Society's Monthly Weather Review attempts to answer that question - for one US cable network at least. A team from Texas A&M University at College Station studied The Weather Channel's predictions over a 14-month period from 2004 to 2006, and compared them with real data on the actual weather at 50 locations across the US.
The team were particularly interested in the channel's figures that claimed to predict the probability of rain within a 12-hour time slot.
Don't tell any of my sources who are evolutionary biologists, but I'm struggling to finish The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin's 150-year-old treatise on the defining principle of the life sciences.
It would be so much simpler if I could sit down with Darwin for a free-wheeling interview. The man was a helluva storyteller, full of so much insight into the natural world that it would take days to transcribe our chat.
I'm determined to finish the Origin before the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth on 12 February. But just in case I don't, I may have to make a trip to Pittsburgh, where researchers and curators at Carnegie Mellon University and Duquesne University have created a virtual Darwin exhibit.
We know of only one for sure (and some might argue even that's a stretch).
To make estimates, researchers have long used a relationship called the Drake equation, plugging in values for things like the galaxy's annual star formation rate and the fraction of stars that host planets (make your own estimate in this interactive equation). There's so much wiggle room in the variables, though, that estimates have ranged from one to a million.
Now, Duncan Forgan of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland has attempted to constrain the numbers a bit better.
In some ways Google has been unlucky. Yahoo!'s Fire Eagle has similar features and was launched last August without much attention from the mainstream media. Both services are opt-in, and feature privacy controls so you can decide who is able to see your exact location, who can only know the city or town you're in, and who isn't allowed to know anything.
Location sharing is older than Fire Eagle too. On social networks like Facebook, people routinely let it be known exactly where they will be at specific times in the future, for example, meeting at a particular pub or restaurant. Geotagging of photos is also common, and some
devices like the iPhone automatically geotag every photo they take.
The world's financial and climate crises have a common cause - and our leaders cannot successfully put capitalism back together without at the same time fixing the environment.
So argued an elite group of scientists and parliamentarians, meeting in London last week. The meeting marked the revival of the Club of Rome, the think tank that almost 30 years ago gave the world the phrase "limits to growth", and then rather disappeared from view as the limits receded on a wave of free-market capitalism.
Although the pilot and passengers on the US Airways flight that ended up ditching into the Hudson River on 15 January reported hitting a large flock of geese, air crash investigators are still working to find out exactly what brought the plane down.
The first photos of bird remains taken from the Airbus A320's engines have just been released by the US National Transportation Safety Board. Remains were found in both engines, one of which had to be fished from the depths of the Hudson.
But the exact species of bird is yet to be confirmed, despite speculation it was Canada geese.
In December, I spoke with team member Adrian Briggs of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. At that point, the team was half-way through decoding 3 billion bases of DNA belonging to a Neanderthal recovered in Croatia's Vindija Cave.
It looks like they really cranked up their sequencers the past couple months.
A new collection by acclaimed poet, and Darwin's great-great-granddaughter, Ruth Padel tells the great man's life and work through a series of vivid poems.
It was a difficult task narrowing down our choice, but we've put our selection of Padel's poems below the fold.
Darwin: A life in poems by Ruth Padel will be published by Chatto and Windus on 12 February 2009.
Amit Zoran, at the MIT media lab, has created an electric guitar able to take on the sound of many others. A central part of the soundboard can be removed and swapped for one of many different chunks of wood to alter the signal generated by the pickups.
Although only a section of the body has changed, software uses the characteristics of the swappable section to make the final result sound like the whole guitar's body was made in the same way. As Zoran puts it "part of the guitar does not actually exist."
It's not unusual for even the most amateur of musicians to own
multiple guitars for their different sounds, so I can see the chameleon
guitar appealing as a way to achieve that in one instrument.
Click "continue reading" for video of the chameleon guitar in action.
I was shocked the first time I watched my 12-year old cousin play Grand Theft Auto Vice City, an ultra-violent video game where the protagonist roams around a city, stealing cars and wreaking bodily havoc. I also averted my eyes through much of 300, a visually stunning yet exceedingly gruesome film about the battle of Thermopylae.
So it was with a certain measure of self-interest that I picked up a new paper claiming that watching horror films and playing violent video games makes college students less inclined to help those in need.
Other researchers have documented other negative effects of violent media, but none applied methods quite this... theatrical.
Among my editors in London, I'm sometimes known as the Prince of Darkness - not for any particular satanic tendencies, but because I frequently send emails when most people in my time zone in California are fast asleep.
For the uninitiated, "sleep hygiene" has nothing to do with the cleanliness of your bedroom, but instead refers to behaviours that influence the quality of your sleep. The problem is that previous research has yielded conflicting results as to which behaviours, exactly, are the most disruptive.
We've all heard about the urban legend where a person wakes up in a hotel bathtub with a scar across the abdomen, one kidney lighter.
However, a new surgical procedure could make donating a kidney nearly scar-free - at least for women. For the first time, doctors extracted a kidney out of a patient's vagina for the purpose of organ donation.
The Pyrenean ibex (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) is a subspecies of mountain goat that went extinct in 2000 when the last surviving individual, a 13-year old female named Celia, was found dead.
Researchers had been trying to save the species from extinction by hunting for some time and, in 1999, Jose Folch of the Centre for Agricultural and Technological Research in Aragon, Spain, and colleagues had collected and frozen some of Celia's skin cells with a view to try cloning her.