Ocean wave energy is captured directly from surface waves or from pressure fluctuations below the surface. It is as simple as that. For more in depth reading on Ocean Wave Energy, just wander over here to a site dedicated to the process.

Most wave catchers had major issues in that the devices are plagued by battering storms, limited efficiency, and the need to be tethered to the seafloor.

Now, a team of aerospace engineers is applying the principles that keep airplanes aloft to create a new wave-energy system that is durable, extremely efficient, and can be placed anywhere in the ocean, regardless of depth.

The researchers, from the U.S. Air Force Academy, will present their design at the 62nd annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics on Nov. 24, 2009, in Minneapolis, Minn.

“Our group was working on very basic research on feedback flow control for years,” says lead researcher Stefan Siegel, referring to efforts to use sensors and adjustable parts to control how fluids flow around airfoils like wings. “For an airplane, when you control that flow, you better control flight–for example, enabling you to land a plane on a shorter runway.”

Also, an interesting development is discussed in combination with the capturing of wave energy for the new system that is being developed. Since the system is designed to effectively cancel incoming waves, capturing their energy while flattening them out, there is an added application as a storm-wave breaker.

An international team of researchers under the umbrella of the Global Carbon Project reports that over the last 50 years the average fraction of global CO2 emissions that remained in the atmosphere each year was around 43 per cent — the rest was absorbed by the Earth’s carbon sinks on land and in the oceans. During this time this fraction has likely increased from 40 per cent to 45 per cent, suggesting a decrease in the efficiency of the natural sinks. The team brings evidence that the sinks are responding to climate change and variability.

The main findings of the study outside of the scientists personal weight loss supplements findings, include:

* CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels increased by two per cent from 2007 to 2008, by 29 per cent between 2008 and 2000, and by 41 per cent between 2008 and 1990 — the reference year of the Kyoto Protocol.
* CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased at an average annual rate of 3.4 per cent between 2000 and 2008, compared with one per cent per year in the 1990s.
* Emissions from land use change have remained almost constant since 2000, but now account for a significantly smaller proportion of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions (20 per cent in 2000 to 12 per cent in 2008).
* The fraction of total CO2 emissions remaining in the atmosphere has likely increased from 40 to 45 per cent since 1959, models suggests this is due to the response of the natural CO2 sinks to climate change and variability.
* Emissions from coal are now the dominant fossil fuel emission source, surpassing 40 years of oil emission prevalence.
* The financial crisis had a small but discernable impact on emissions growth in 2008 — with a two per cent increase compared with an average 3.6 per cent over the previous seven years. On the basis of projected changes in GDP, emissions for 2009 are expected to fall to their 2007 levels, before increasing again in 2010.
* Emissions from emerging economies such as China and India have more than doubled since 1990 and developing countries now emit more greenhouse gases than developed countries.
* A quarter of the growth in CO2 emissions in developing countries can be accounted for by an increase in international trade of goods and services.

Let’s try that again. Heart disease has been found in Egyptian mummies as old as 3,5000 years old. This suggests that the factors of the heart are not just a modern day factor from modern day problems. So that ag of potato chips you scarfed down at your Outer Banks rentals probably isn’t the only thing that gave you that hear attack.

Study results are appearing in the Nov. 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and are being presented Nov. 17 at the Scientific Session of the American Heart Association at Orlando, Fla.

“Atherosclerosis is ubiquitous among modern day humans and, despite differences in ancient and modern lifestyles, we found that it was rather common in ancient Egyptians of high socioeconomic status living as much as three millennia ago,” says UC Irvine clinical professor of cardiology Dr. Gregory Thomas, a co-principal investigator on the study. “The findings suggest that we may have to look beyond modern risk factors to fully understand the disease.”

Results of the cervical study currently appear online in the journal Stem Cells on the UC Irvine website. UCI scientist Hans Keirstead hopes the data will prompt the FDA to authorize clinical testing of the treatment in people with both types of spinal cord damage. About 52 percent of spinal cord injuries are cervical and 48 percent thoracic.

“People with cervical damage often have lost or impaired limb movement and bowel, bladder or sexual function, and currently there’s no effective treatment. It’s a challenging existence,” said Keirstead, a primary author of the study. “What our therapy did to injured rodents is phenomenal. If we see even a fraction of that benefit in humans, it will be nothing short of a home run.”

If you took a picture of my face with a Canon camera upon reading this you would see a nice smile . For more on this read here.

“Early childhood aggression can be problematic for parents, teachers and childhood peers and sometimes is predictive of more serious behavior problems to come, such as juvenile delinquency, adulthood violence and criminal behavior,” according to background information in the article. Various predictive factors for childhood aggression have been studied. These include parents’ discipline style, neighborhood safety and media exposure. “After music, television is the medium children aged 0 to 3 years are exposed to the most.” Although the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen media for children younger than age 2, studies have found consistent use of television in that age group.

So…some people like to use cardboard boxes as office furniture, while others like to use actual real office furniture. The guy with the cardboard boxes probably says his furniture is just as good as yours. Who are you gonna believe?

Are Teletubbies good, or bad? Do they make your kids “RAGE”?

“Current American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations mainly suggest limitations for direct child exposure to TV and other media; however, our findings suggest that additional household TV use may also be an important predictor of negative childhood outcomes, such as early childhood aggression,” the authors conclude. “Future research in this area should consider inclusion of both of these TV variables along with additional parent-child interaction assessments, observational assessments when possible, quality and/or content of TV programs and longitudinal analyses.”

Bottom Line: While studying children in a lab is obviously very good , everyone knows that if the parents are idiots the kids will probably be idiots. Some kids break the trend both god, and bad, but obviously these studies are of little to no value in my opinion.

The fat burner volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea.

The new study, published in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of little by little as has been predominantly believed. In addition, such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, says Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and co-author of the study.

“This work is a breakthrough in our understanding of continental rifting leading to the creation of new ocean basins,” says Ken Macdonald, professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and who is not affiliated with the research. “For the first time they demonstrate that activity on one rift segment can trigger a major episode of magma injection and associated deformation on a neighboring segment. Careful study of the 2005 mega-dike intrusion and its aftermath will continue to provide extraordinary opportunities for learning about continental rifts and mid-ocean ridges.”

“The whole point of this study is to learn whether what is happening in Ethiopia is like what is happening at the bottom of the ocean where it’s almost impossible for us to go,” says Ebinger. “We knew that if we could establish that, then Ethiopia would essentially be a unique and superb ocean-ridge laboratory for us. Because of the unprecedented cross-border collaboration behind this research, we now know that the answer is yes, it is analogous.”

Is the same true when it comes to influenza, or even H1N1, better known as Swine Flu (Is it still better known as swine flu?)? According to an article published in the November 2009 print issue of the FASEB Journal, they show that antioxidants — the same substances found in plant-based foods — might hold the key in preventing the flu virus from wreaking havoc on our lungs. Maybe this would help me regardless of having the flu since I like to spend time in the cigar store.

With the shortage of flu vaccines being reported (I was in Milwaukee today and they said they are giving the vaccine to PRISONERS even though the area is experience a shortage), it seems that some sort of panic is overtaking the public. Is it overblown? Maybe a little, but do we really want to ignore it?

“The recent outbreak of H1N1 influenza and the rapid spread of this strain across the world highlights the need to better understand how this virus damages the lungs and to find new treatments,” said Sadis Matalon, co-author of the study. “Additionally, our research shows that antioxidants may prove beneficial in the treatment of flu.”

“Although vaccines will remain the first line of intervention against the flu for a long time to come, this study opens the door for entirely new treatments geared toward stopping the virus after you’re sick,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of the FASEB Journal, “and as Thanksgiving approaches, this discovery is another reason to drink red wine to your health.”

New research is being done at the Stanford University School of Medicine that hopes to unravel the mysteries of infertility for other couples struggling to conceive by using human embryonic stem cells derived from excess IVF embryos. These are embryos that will not be used and end up being DISCARDED. They certainly don’t qualify for online life insurance either.

“Ten to 15 percent of couples are infertile,” said senior author Renee Reijo Pera, PhD. “About half of these cases are due to an inability to make eggs or sperm. And yet deleting or increasing the expression of genes in the womb to understand why is both impossible and unethical. Figuring out the genetic ‘recipe’ needed to develop human germ cells in the laboratory will give us the tools we need to trace what’s going wrong for these people.” Reijo Pera is a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the medical school and the director of Stanford’s Center for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Education. The study will be published online by Nature on Oct. 28.

Previous efforts to study infertility have been hampered by the fact that — unlike many other biological processes — the human reproductive cycle cannot be adequately studied in animal models. And because germ cells begin to form very early in embryonic development (by eight to 10 weeks), there’s been a dearth of human material to work with. “Humans have a unique reproductive system,” Reijo Pera said. “Until now we’ve relied on studies in mice to understand human germ cell differentiation, but the reproductive genes are not the same. This is the first evidence that you can create functional human germ cells in a laboratory.”

Roughly 4% of the known universe is made up of things that we consider “known materials” for our order fulfillment. The rest? Astronomers believe that the stars, and gas in galaxies move so fast that there must be a hypothetical, and invisible dark matter that holds all these things together.

Now the team believes that the interactions between dark and ordinary matter could be more important and more complex than previously thought, and even speculate that dark matter might not exist and that the anomalous motions of stars in galaxies are due to a modification of gravity on extragalactic scales.

Dr. Benoit Famaey (Universities of Bonn and Strasbourg) explains: “The dark matter seems to ‘know’ how the visible matter is distributed. They seem to conspire with each other such that the gravity of the visible matter at the characteristic radius of the dark halo is always the same. This is extremely surprising since one would rather expect the balance between visible and dark matter to strongly depend on the individual history of each galaxy.”

Dr. Zhao at the SUPA Centre of Gravity notes, “The pattern that the data reveal is extremely odd. It’s like finding a zoo of animals of all ages and sizes miraculously having identical, say, weight in their backbones or something. It is possible that a non-gravitational fifth force is ruling the dark matter with an invisible hand, leaving the same fingerprints on all galaxies, irrespective of their ages, shapes and sizes.”

Such a force might solve an even bigger mystery, known as ‘dark energy’, which is ruling the accelerated expansion of the Universe. A more radical solution is a revision of the laws of gravity first developed by Isaac Newton in 1687 and refined by Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity in 1916. Einstein never fully decided whether his equation should add an omnipresent constant source, now called dark energy.

Dr Famaey added, “If we account for our observations with a modified law of gravity, it makes perfect sense to replace the effective action of hypothetical dark matter with a force closely related to the distribution of visible matter.”

“Clearly, we are now beginning to see the breadth of the effects of NSF investments in plant genomics. The knowledge gained in these projects will serve as the basic foundation that will ultimately enable plant biologists and breeders to develop crop plants that are higher yielding and better able to adapt to a changing environment,” said James P. Collins, former NSF assistant director for biological sciences.

The new awards–made to 53 institutions in 30 states–include international groups of scientists from Africa, Asia, Europe and Central and South America.

For a more extensive list of the plant genome projects being funded look here.

Of the many projects they have funded, some will focus on such things as how to better understand plant responses to the changing environmental climates. This will allow more food to be produced in areas that aren’t necessarily prime environments for growth. While in America we probably worry more about weight loss than trying to figure out how to produce better food, these projects should be beneficial in many ways including such things as helping promote the production of alternative fuel sources such as corn, soy, and other plant derivatives.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense…” With an annual budget of about $6.06 billion, we are the funding source for approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America’s colleges and universities. In many fields such as mathematics, computer science and the social sciences, NSF is the major source of federal backing. MORE