Very important news of the day

Geneticists Estimate Publication Date Of The 'Iliad'

2013-02-27T06:29:00.004-08:00

"The text is Homer's "Iliad," and Homer -- if there was such a person -- probably wrote it in 762 B.C., give or take 50 years, the researchers found. The "Iliad" tells the story of the Trojan War -- if there was such a war -- with Greeks battling Trojans."

"Languages behave just extraordinarily like genes," Pagel said. "It is directly analogous. We tried to document the regularities in linguistic evolution and study Homer's vocabulary as a way of seeing if language evolves the way we think it does. If so, then we should be able to find a date for Homer."

"They took the language of the Hittites, a people that existed during the time the war may have been fought, and modern Greek, and traced the changes in the words from Hittite to Homeric to modern. It is precisely how they measure the genetic history of humans, going back and seeing how and when genes alter over time."

Source: http://www.insidescience.org/content/geneticists-estimate-publication-date-iliad/946

Average Salary for High Paying Tech Skills

2013-02-26T12:20:00.000-08:00

"SaaS is worth almost $101,000"
"Data Warehouse is worth $101,000"
"Change Management is worth $101,000"
"Azure is worth $101,000"
"Nginx is worth more than $101,000"
"Unified Modeling Language (UML) is worth more than $102,000"

Fortran	$103,695
SaaS	$101,000
JSP(Java Server Pages)	$98,255
Ruby	$98,072
Perl	$97,437
Python	$94,895
Assembler/Assembly	$94,642
Java/J2EE	$94,085
C++	$92,248

Source: http://marketing.dice.com/pdf/Dice_TechSalarySurvey_2013.pdf

Coffee car grinds out world speed record

2013-02-21T04:37:00.000-08:00

The British-made Bean Machine hit 65.5mph on Tuesday to become the fastest vehicle to run on caffeine.

"Coffee chaf pellets, which are produced from the waste in coffee production, are heated in a charcoal fire, where they break down into carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

"The gas is then cooled and filtered before hydrogen is combusted to drive the engine.

"Any car can run on gasification,’ he added. ‘In fact, during the World War II, there were over 100,000 vehicles in the K that ran on gasification, including cars, buses and delivery vehicles.

"At the beginning of the 20th century, there were over 90,000 vehicles running on gasifiers across the world.’

Source: http://metro.co.uk/2013/02/20/the-bean-machine-coffee-car-grinds-out-world-speed-record-3505281/

Easter sprinkling in Hungary

2012-04-10T00:54:00.000-07:00

"There are a lot of interesting folk customs still alive all over Hungary. The two, most known customs of Easter are the "sprinkling" and the egg-painting. Both are very common in both urban and rural areas, among people of every age-group."

"A couple of decades ago men poured water on women in rural areas and women wore folk costumes. Boys often dragged girls to the well and poured water on them with pail. Sometimes they washed them in creek. The possible reason for this very old tradition is that people believed in the cleaning, healing and fertility effect of water."

Source: http://minnesotahungarians.com/?q=node/227

Can Water Float on Oil?

2012-04-06T03:16:00.000-07:00

"The floatability of water on oil surface was studied. A numerical model was developed from the Young–Laplace equation on three interfaces (water/oil, water/air, and oil/air) to predict the theoretical equilibration conditions. The model was verified successfully with an oil/water system. The stability of the floating droplet depends on the combination of three interface tensions, oil density, and water droplet volume. For practical purposes, however, the equilibrium contact angle has to be greater than 5° so the water droplet can effectively float. This result has significant applications for biodegrading oil wastes."

Source: http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/la204820a

Faster-than-light neutrinos could be down to bad wiring

2012-02-23T08:08:00.000-08:00

"In September 2011, the Opera experiment reported it had seen particles called neutrinos evidently travelling faster than the speed of light."

"A repeat of the experiment by the Opera team will now address whether the issues they have found affect the ultimate neutrino speed they measure.
The two problems the team has identified would have opposing effects on the apparent speed."

"On the one hand, the team said there is a problem in the "oscillator" that provides a ticking clock to the experiment in the intervals between the synchronisations of GPS equipment.
This is used to provide start and stop times for the measurement as well as precise distance information.
That problem would increase the measured time of the neutrinos' flight, in turn reducing the surprising faster-than-light effect."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17139635

3500 years old ancient jokes

2012-01-31T04:51:00.000-08:00

"The evidence of sex, politics and beer-drinking comes from a newly translated tablet, dating back more than 3,500 years, which reveals a series of riddles.

The text is fragmentary in parts and appears to have been written by an inexperienced hand, possibly a student. The researchers aren't sure where the tablet originates, though they suspect its scribe lived in the southern part of Mesopotamia, near the Persian "

He gouged out the eye:

It is not the fate of a dead man.

He cut the throat: A dead man (-Who is it?)

The answer is a governor.

In(?) your mouth and your teeth (or: your urine)

constantly stared at you

the measuring vessel of your lord (-What is it?)

The answer, it appears, is beer.

The deflowered (girl) did not become pregnant

The undeflowered (girl) became pregnant (-What is it?)

The answer, strangely enough, appears to be "auxiliary forces," a group of soldiers that tend not to be reliable.

The tower is high

it is high, but nonetheless has no shade (- What is it?)

The answer is sunlight.

Like a fish in a fish pond

Like troops before the king (-What is it?)

The answer is a broken bow.

Source: http://www.livescience.com/18147-ancient-riddles-decoded-mesopotamia.html

Teens send Lego man on an a balloon odyssey 24 kilometres high

2012-01-27T08:01:00.000-08:00

"Two weeks ago, Ho and Muhammad launched a homemade balloon carrying a Lego passenger and four cameras. It fell back down to Earth 97 minutes later with astonishing footage from an estimated 24 kilometres above sea level, three times the typical cruising altitude of a commercial aircraft."

"The project cost $400 and took four months of free Saturdays. It wasn’t a school assignment. They just thought it would be cool."

"They ordered a professional, $85 weather balloon online, and bought $160 worth of helium from a party supply store. Ho purchased a special wide-angle video camera he had been coveting with his own money."

"Finally, they assembled the whole thing, carefully carving out space inside the Styrofoam container for the three point-and-shoots, the wide-angle video camera, and a cellphone with a downloaded GPS app. They super-glued their Lego astronaut to a gangplank on the outside, and printed off a Canadian flag for him to hold. "

Source and video here: http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1120808--toronto-teens-send-lego-man-on-a-balloon-odyssey-24-kilometres-high

Russian scientist claims to have discovered life on Venus

2012-01-24T07:05:00.000-08:00

"Leonid Ksanfomaliti, an astronomer at Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, claims to have detected signs of life in 30-year-old photographs of Venus."

"Science fiction writers of the Golden Age often imagine that a habitable world existed hidden below the deep cloud cover of the Venusian atmosphere, and it made for some great stories - the time I read Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day" in middle school still haunts me. But by the 1960s, the American Mariner probes and their Soviet Venera counterparts had revealed Venus was just about the most inhospitable place imaginable, an acidic world with surface temperatures of about 900 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures nearly 92 times that of Earth."

"As far as these cloud-based microbes go, the current scientific consensus is that the possibility can't be dismissed. Of course, that's a far cry from actually proving there's life on Venus, and even that is still about a million light-years away from scorpions and black flaps hanging out on the Venusian surface."

Source: http://io9.com/5878554/russian-scientist-claims-to-have-discovered-life-on-venus

How much energy would the Death Star require?

2012-01-17T07:56:00.000-08:00

"This planet is going to be modelled after earth with the exception that it is a solid planet. It is then possible to use the gravitational binding energy of the target planet to estimate the amount of energy required to be supplied to the Death Star's laser beam in order to destroy it [...] The energy required to destroy the planet in question is 2.25 ⨉ 10^32 J. However, the destruction of large planets such as Jupiter can require much larger energy demands [...] we can estimate this energy to be 2 ⨉ 10^36 J "

Source: http://io9.com/5876473/how-much-energy-would-the-death-star-require-to-destroy-earth

Chemistry Nobel for quasicrystals

2011-10-05T06:27:00.000-07:00

"Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals, a mosaic-like chemical structure that researchers previously thought was impossible."

Source: http://mg.co.za/article/2011-10-05-israeli-wins-chemistry-nobel-for-quasicrystals/

Prehistoric Children Finger-Painted on Cave Walls

2011-10-03T02:06:00.000-07:00

"As many exasperated parents have discovered, kids like to draw on walls. It turns out they’ve been doing it since the Stone Age, in some cases with the help and encouragement of grown-ups. Researchers have uncovered evidence that children as young as 2 decorated France’s Rouffignac caves with markings known as finger flutings at least 13,000 years ago, drawing not only simple lines but also symbolic shapes. The most prolific budding artist, thought to have been a 5-year-old girl, braved the pitch-dark caverns’ rocky terrain to hone her craft on high, remote corners—perched, perhaps, on the shoulders of an approving adult."

Source: http://www.history.com/news/2011/09/30/prehistoric-children-finger-painted-on-cave-walls/

Dogma breaking: speed of light

2011-09-23T04:23:00.000-07:00

"A startling find at one of the world's foremost laboratories that a subatomic particle seemed to move faster than the speed of light has scientists around the world rethinking Albert Einstein and one of the foundations of physics.

Researchers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva, who announced the discovery Thursday are still somewhat surprised themselves and planned to detail their findings on Friday.

Source: http://www.wpri.com/dpps/news/strange_news/roll-over-einstein-pillar-of-physics-challenged-ob11-jgr_3948307

Workers Find 7-Million-Year-Old Beaver Teeth

2011-09-19T06:20:00.000-07:00

"The Bureau of Land Management says a fossil found by employees on federal land represents the earliest record of living beavers in North America.

The pair of teeth was found on BLM land in northeast Oregon.

The Albany Democrat-Herald reports the teeth come from the Rattlesnake Formation and are 7 to 7.3 million years old.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/09/18/workers-find-7-million-year-old-beaver-teeth-in-oregon/

Marco Polo never reached China

2011-08-10T01:13:00.000-07:00

"The doubters told Italian history magazine Focus Storia that there were numerous inconsistencies and inaccuracies in Marco Polo’s description of Kublai Khan’s attempted invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281.

'In his account of the first invasion, he describes the fleet leaving Korea and being hit by a typhoon before it reached the Japanese coast,' said Professor Daniele Petrella of the University of Naples, the leader of the archaeology team.

'But that happened in 1281 – is it really possible that a supposed eye witness could confuse events which were seven years apart?'

He said that Polo’s description of the Mongol fleet did not square with the remains of ships that the team had excavated in Japan, as he had written of ships with five masts, while those which had been found had only three.

'It was during our dig that doubts began to emerge about much of what he wrote,' said Prof. Petrella.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2024221/Marco-Polo-reached-China-picked-tales-Orient-Italians-claim.html

Magnetite 3D Colloidal Crystals Formed in the Early Solar System 4.6 Billion Years Ago

2011-08-08T02:42:00.000-07:00

The Tagish Lake meteorite, which fell to Earth in Canada in 2000, contains unusual opal-like crystals.

"First, a certain amount of solution water must have been present in the meteorite to disperse the colloidal particles,” the report explains. “The solution water must have been confined in small voids, in which colloidal crystallization takes place. These conditions, along with evidence from similar meteorites, suggest that the crystals may have formed 4.6 billion years ago."

"We believe that, if synthesized, magnetite colloidal crystals have promising potential as a novel functional material,” the article notes."

Source: http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja2005708 and http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=223&content_id=CNBP_027957&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=8730441f-f665-4dd4-805a-64b26f75a0ca

First observational test of the ‘multiverse’

2011-08-04T03:08:00.000-07:00

"Many modern theories of fundamental physics predict that our universe is contained inside a bubble. In addition to our bubble, this `multiverse’ will contain others, each of which can be thought of as containing a universe. In the other ‘pocket universes’ the fundamental constants, and even the basic laws of nature, might be different.

Until now, nobody had been able to find a way to efficiently search for signs of bubble universe collisions – and therefore proof of the multiverse – in the CMB radiation, as the disc-like patterns in the radiation could be located anywhere in the sky. Additionally, physicists needed to be able to test whether any patterns they detected were the result of collisions or just random patterns in the noisy data."

Source: http://physicsinventions.com/?p=2735

EnviroMission plans massive solar tower for Arizona

2011-07-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

"An ambitious solar energy project on a massive scale is about to get underway in the Arizona desert. EnviroMission is undergoing land acquisition and site-specific engineering to build its first full-scale solar tower - and when we say full-scale, we mean it! The mammoth 800-plus meter (2625 ft) tall tower will instantly become one of the world's tallest buildings. Its 200-megawatt power generation capacity will reliably feed the grid with enough power for 150,000 US homes, and once it's built, it can be expected to more or less sit there producing clean, renewable power with virtually no maintenance until it's more than 80 years old. "

Source: http://www.gizmag.com/enviromission-solar-tower-arizona-clean-energy-renewable/19287/

Could the Big Bang have been a quick conversion of antimatter into matter?

2011-07-20T07:50:00.000-07:00

"Dragan Slavkov Hajdukovic, a physicist on leave from Cetinje, Montenegro, currently working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, emphasizes that he has no idea if this scenario occurred 13.7 billion years ago or not. But in a recent study published in Astrophysics and Space Science, he has described a mechanism that can convert matter into antimatter (or vice versa) that results in a cyclic universe that is successively dominated by matter and antimatter. In this scenario, when a matter-dominated universe collapses, an antimatter-dominated universe emerges, and the cycle continues indefinitely."

"...my work is an attempt to understand astrophysical and cosmological phenomena in the framework of the established physics, without invoking unknown forms of matter-energy and unknown mechanisms for inflation and matter-antimatter asymmetry."

"My answer may be wrong, but if it is correct it would radically change theoretical physics, astrophysics and cosmology.”

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-big-quick-conversion-antimatter.html

Parents Use Facebook to Spy on Kids

2011-07-20T06:52:00.000-07:00

"Eleven percent of parents polled set up their Facebook accounts purely to “snoop” on Jim and Jane, 15-percent have tried to Friend their children (Thanks Mom), with 4-percent of those requests being rejected. Not surprisingly, 13-percent have resorted to logging onto friends accounts in order to check up on their children."

"“For the love of god–don’t let parents join Facebook” group, and there are hundreds of other pages dedicated to grumbling about the subject. www.myparentsjoinedfacebook.com, is a website set up purely to collect embarrassing parent/child Facebook moments and share them with the world."

Source: http://blog.laptopmag.com/more-than-half-of-parents-use-facebook-to-spy-on-kids

Some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals

2011-07-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

The ancestors of early modern humans left Africa about 80,000 to 50,000 years ago, according to DiscoveryNews.com. Despite that wide spread in time, genetic material from Neanderthals still can be found in a piece of DNA (called a haplotype) in the human X chromosome -- meaning the two clearly mated.

"This confirms recent findings suggesting that the two populations interbred," says Dr. Labuda. His team places the timing of such intimate contacts and family ties early on, probably at the crossroads of the Middle East.

Linux-based system tries to tame San Francisco traffic

2011-07-11T07:20:00.000-07:00

"McCain says it will supply San Francisco with a new Linux-based traffic controller computer that meets the latest Advanced Transportation Controller (ATC) standards. Built around a Freescale PowerQUICC II Pro processor, the "2070LXN2 NEMA" offers several keypads, an 8x40 display, plus Ethernet, USB, serial, and SDLC connections, says the company.

McCain collaborated with Fourth Dimension Traffic to win the San Francisco bid. The company ported Fourth Dimension's "D4" traffic signal software package to McCain's controller in a process that took less than three months, says the company.
The combined solution enabled the City of San Francisco to migrate its existing "2070" traffic software to an ATC platform, thereby reducing costs, says McCain (see farther below for background)."

Source: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/McCain-2070LXN2-NEMA-controller-/

Natural Bridge on the Moon

2011-06-23T02:09:00.000-07:00

"Natural bridges on the Earth are typically the result of wind and water erosion - not a likely scenario on the Moon. So how did this natural bridge form? The most likely answer is dual collapse into a lava tube. From the Apollo era, SELENE, and LROC images, we know that lava tubes did form in the Moon's ancient past."

Source: http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index.php?/archives/277-Natural-Bridge-on-the-Moon!.html

Cameron Diaz: 'I love Alex Rodriguez too much'

2011-06-22T01:08:00.000-07:00

Diaz recalled: "We were watching the game, and I was eating, and I was getting down to, like, the last couple pieces of popcorn. And all of a sudden, I see [Alex's] hand coming in.

"Anybody who knows me does not put their hand in my food, especially when it's close to my mouth. I said, 'What are you...?' And then I went, 'You know what? I love you too much, I'm going to give it to you. You deserve it.'"

Source: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/showbiz/news/a326141/cameron-diaz-i-love-alex-rodriguez-too-much.html

Giant Globe Made of 10,000 Live-Updating OLED Panels

2011-06-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

"“Geo-Cosmos” is made up of 10,362 OLED panels that display continuously-updating satellite footage of our tiny blue marble, representing what our planet looks like from space in something close to realtime. It replaces an earlier model covered in LED panels, offering museum-goers a full 10 million pixels, a resolution 10 times greater than its predecessor."

Source: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-06/worlds-largest-spherical-oled-display-10000-panel-globe-updated-satellite-pics