Chemists Design Method to Figure Out What Your Meat Ate

Foodies want to know everything about their animal-based dishes these days ? where the meat came from, what it ate, what its name was. OK, maybe not that last part. But there is a big difference between industrial cattle farms and grass-fed meat ? both in price and in nutritional considerations.

We?ve already seen how chemistry can help monitor the source of your meals, ensuring that you don?t eat endangered species. Now you can tell what your beef ate before it reached your plate.

A group of chemists from Ireland figured out a way to reconstruct the diet of cattle, determining whether they spent their days munching fresh pasture grasses rather than barley or silage. Frank J. Monahan and colleagues studied the proportions of stable isotopes of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and sulfur found in the muscle tissue and tail hair of Irish beef cattle. They were able to determine what the animals primarily ate, and in some cases, could even figure out where the animals came from.

Certain diets yielded a distinctive signature, the researchers report in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. They couldn?t tell between animals that ate from a pasture and those that ate grass silage, but there were clear differences between animals that ate pasture grass and those that ate concentrated food products. Using hair and tail samples, they could even follow changes in an animal?s diet over the course of its lifetime. The researchers could tell whether a steer had switched from a grass diet to a corn-based diet near the end of its life, for instance.

Monitoring animals? tail hair yielded such precise information about diet that it could be used to monitor farms? production practices, the authors say.

Stable isotope ratios have also been used to determine the source of bottled drinks, and figure out where people have been based on chemicals left behind in their hair.

Speaking of soft drinks, chemists also announced this week that they're using protein analysis to test for kola nuts, a pricey ingredient found in natural cola drinks. Drinks containing the kola nut had the signature of plant proteins, while Coca Cola ? which does not claim to use the kola nut ? did not.

Testing methods like these could give consumers assurances that they really are getting what they pay for.

[Eurekalert]

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Video: Ranger Robot Sets New Distance Record, Walking 40 Miles on a Single Charge

Ranger Extends Its Range

Cornell?s Ranger Robot, world record holder for the longest walk by a robot on a single charge, has smashed its own personal best by logging 40.5 miles without stopping, recharging, or even being touched. Over the course of almost 31 hours, Ranger ambled along at a not-so-blazing 1.3 miles per hour for 397.75 laps around a running track, but managed to make the whole trek using just a nickel?s worth of electricity.

The robot?s previous record, set in July of last year, was just 14.3 miles. Ranger?s handlers at Cornell were able to squeeze more mileage out of their robot by improving its efficiency through better overall control. Ranger gets by on far less power than most legged robots because, for the most part, its legs swing freely, catching the robot as it falls forward and pushing it into its next step.

So while watching Ranger go may not be the most exciting thing going in robotics right now, the waist-tall little ?bot is something of a feat in consistency and efficiency. After all, it made 186,076 steps while covering more than 40 miles in this latest attempt, and never missed a step. That?s better than most humans can say.

Cue the Chariots of Fire and watch Ranger go in the video below. Of particular anti-climactic interest: the big finish, at the 3:40 mark.

[PhysOrg]

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Kan. boy clawed by leopard leaves hospital (AP)

WICHITA, Kan. ? A 7-year-old Kansas boy who was clawed by a leopard last week during a school field trip to a zoo in Wichita is out of the hospital.

The first-grader went home Monday, three days after his run-in with the big cat at the Sedgwick County Zoo.

Zoo officials say the boy climbed over a 4-foot railing around the leopard exhibit, crossed an 8-foot safety zone and stood next to the metal mesh fence. The leopard was able to get its paws through the mesh and clawed the boy on the neck and face.

KAKE-TV reports the boy's family issued a statement Monday thanking bystanders who rushed to help after the attack.

___

Information from: KAKE-TV, http://

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Biologists Announce Discovery of an Entirely New Branch of Life

Maybe it's fungus, maybe it's not

In further proof that we never know just how much we don?t know, a paper published in Nature suggests that biologists in the UK have discovered an entirely new and unique branch in the tree of life. A group of mysterious microscopic organisms related to fungus are actually so different that they make up their own kind of fungal group. Another way to say that: there are so many of these distinctly different kinds of organisms living in so many diverse places, that the biodiversity among this new group might be as vast as the entire known fungal kingdom. In fact, they might not actually be fungi at all.

The scientists who have discovered this new clade--a clade is like a branch on the tree of life that consists of an organism and all of its descendants--have named it cryptomycota, which loosely means ?hidden from the kingdom Fungi? so we?re told. And indeed the cryptomycota have remained hidden from sight even though it turns out they are everywhere, living in many different environments, including freshwater lakes and sediments, as well as pond water.

While biologists estimate that they?ve only categorized and cataloged about 10 percent of all fungi in the world, they were pretty sure that they?d discovered all the major groups. Cryptomycota is so new and biologically different than other fungi that scientists have yet to characterized its life cycle precisely--which is reasonable considering this is the first time researchers have ever knowingly studied them as a completely different clade.

As such, there are a lot of questions surrounding cryptomycota. How did they evolve to survive in so many diverse environments? Does their life cycle involve developing a cell wall, or do they acquire a cell wall parasitically? And, possibly, are cryptomycota fundamentally fungi at all, or are they something completely different?

Answering questions like those is going to take a lot of time, a lot of research, a lot of papers, and likely a lot of argument in the global biological community. If an entirely new taxonomical kingdom is established and it turns out everything you learned in high school was significantly incomplete, we?ll certainly let you know.

[Ars Technica, NPR]

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Video: Japanese Speedster Robot Levitates on a Cushion of Air

It could spawn high-speed ground-effect trains

Researchers in Japan are trying to get a new kind of high speed train technology off the ground, and to prove they?re serious they?ve built a ground-effect robot that floats on a cushion of air. If their demo project works satisfactorily, it could set in motion a plan to build commuter trains that essentially fly inches from the ground, cutting friction and increasing overall efficiency.

Though on its face it sounds similar, this is not maglev. Ground-effect vehicles are more like extremely low flying airplanes that use stubby wings and the lift provided by the fast-moving air between its body and the ground to stay just a few inches aloft. As such, they are in some ways more complex than maglev trains--you have to manage for pitch, yaw, and roll as with an aircraft--but in other ways they are more simple.

For one, maglevs create a certain amount of drag between the bottom of the train and the track below that reduces efficiency. Perhaps even more daunting these days, maglevs are also extremely expensive to build.

The vehicle seen above (and below) was developed by researchers at Japan?s Tohoku University to test autonomous stabilization in a ground effects vehicle. Data collected from their model robot will be used to develop a manned experimental train that can run on a closed, U-shaped track at about 125 miles per hour. If that works, Japan will officially have a prototype of an advanced train just as fast as--and several generations ahead of--America?s fastest passenger train on a good day.

[IEEE Spectrum]

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Study: It's not teacher, but method that matters (AP)

WASHINGTON ? Who's better at teaching difficult physics to a class of more than 250 college students: the highly rated veteran professor using time-tested lecturing, or the inexperienced graduate students interacting with kids via devices that look like TV remotes? The answer could rattle ivy on college walls.

A study by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, now a science adviser to President Barack Obama, suggests that how you teach is more important than who does the teaching.

He found that in nearly identical classes, Canadian college students learned a lot more from teaching assistants using interactive tools than they did from a veteran professor giving a traditional lecture. The students who had to engage interactively using the TV remote-like devices scored about twice as high on a test compared to those who heard the normal lecture, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The interactive method had almost no lecturing. It involved short, small-group discussions, in-class "clicker" quizzes, demonstrations and question-answer sessions. The teachers got real-time graphic feedback on what the students were learning and what they weren't getting.

"It's really what's going on in the students' minds rather than who is instructing them," said lead researcher Carl Wieman of the University of British Columbia, who shared a Nobel physics prize in 2001. "This is clearly more effective learning. Everybody should be doing this. ... You're practicing bad teaching if you are not doing this."

The study compared just two sections of physics classes for just one week, but Wieman said the technique would work for other sciences as well, and even for history.

Previous research has produced similar results. But this study, appearing in a major scientific journal and written by a Nobel laureate, can make a big difference in the field of teaching science, said Robert Beichner, a physicist and professor of science education at North Carolina State University. Beichner, who was named the 2010 U.S. undergraduate science professor of the year by the Society for College Science Teachers, wasn't part of the study but praised Wieman's work.

"He's got the scientific chops" to make other professors consider retooling their approaches, Beichner said.

Wieman heads the science education programs at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Colorado. He's also associate director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Lloyd Armstrong, a former provost at the University of Southern California and professor of physics and education, agreed that the study shows "it's not the professor, it's not even the technology, it's the approach."

Beichner, who uses the more hands-on method himself, likened it to the difference between being told how to ride a bike vs. getting on and riding it.

A prominent proponent of the traditional physics teaching method declined to talk about the study. Walter Lewin of MIT wrote in an email, "I have a rather unique lecture style which they could not cover in their tests."

In the spring 2010 experiment, Wieman and his colleagues followed two nearly identical physics classes of more than 250 students that were taught the usual way three hours a week for 11 weeks. In the 12th week, one class stuck with the long-tenured and well-regarded professor in lecture mode. The second class was taught by two of Wieman's grad students using the interactive method.

The classes' test scores were nearly identical before the interactive sessions, but there was an obvious difference after the students took a 12-question quiz on what they were taught during the experimental week of instruction. Students in the interactive class got an average of 74 percent of the questions right, while those taught using traditional method scored only 41 percent.

The best scores in the traditional class were below average for the interactive class, Wieman said. In addition, student attendance and attention were higher in the interactive class.

The professor who lectured students had been sure his method would work better, and it took a while for him to get over the results, said Louis Deslauriers, one of the graduate students who taught the interactive class. But now the professor is striving to adopt the new method.

The two graduate students are co-authors of the study and knew that what they were doing was part of the research, meaning this wasn't the usual blind scientific experiment. But Wieman said that didn't affect the results of the study. Independent people monitored the students and teachers' actions in the classroom. Wieman declined to identify the veteran professor, who was a willing participant.

Wieman said the need for a more hands-on teaching approach isn't an indictment of a generation raised on video games. It has more to do with the way the brain learns, he said. This method has long worked well in individual tutoring; it's just now being applied on a grander scale, he said.

As far as professorial brilliance, there's "nothing magical about a particular person," he said.

"Lectures have been equally ineffective for centuries," the Nobelist said. "Now we have figured out ways to do it better."

___

Online: http://www.sciencemag.org

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Study: It's not teacher, but method that matters (AP)

WASHINGTON ? Who's better at teaching difficult physics to a class of more than 250 college students: the highly rated veteran professor using time-tested lecturing, or the inexperienced graduate students interacting with kids via devices that look like TV remotes? The answer could rattle ivy on college walls.

A study by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, now a science adviser to President Barack Obama, suggests that how you teach is more important than who does the teaching.

He found that in nearly identical classes, Canadian college students learned a lot more from teaching assistants using interactive tools than they did from a veteran professor giving a traditional lecture. The students who had to engage interactively using the TV remote-like devices scored about twice as high on a test compared to those who heard the normal lecture, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The interactive method had almost no lecturing. It involved short, small-group discussions, in-class "clicker" quizzes, demonstrations and question-answer sessions. The teachers got real-time graphic feedback on what the students were learning and what they weren't getting.

"It's really what's going on in the students' minds rather than who is instructing them," said lead researcher Carl Wieman of the University of British Columbia, who shared a Nobel physics prize in 2001. "This is clearly more effective learning. Everybody should be doing this. ... You're practicing bad teaching if you are not doing this."

The study compared just two sections of physics classes for just one week, but Wieman said the technique would work for other sciences as well, and even for history.

Previous research has produced similar results. But this study, appearing in a major scientific journal and written by a Nobel laureate, can make a big difference in the field of teaching science, said Robert Beichner, a physicist and professor of science education at North Carolina State University. Beichner, who was named the 2010 U.S. undergraduate science professor of the year by the Society for College Science Teachers, wasn't part of the study but praised Wieman's work.

"He's got the scientific chops" to make other professors consider retooling their approaches, Beichner said.

Wieman heads the science education programs at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Colorado. He's also associate director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Lloyd Armstrong, a former provost at the University of Southern California and professor of physics and education, agreed that the study shows "it's not the professor, it's not even the technology, it's the approach."

Beichner, who uses the more hands-on method himself, likened it to the difference between being told how to ride a bike vs. getting on and riding it.

A prominent proponent of the traditional physics teaching method declined to talk about the study. Walter Lewin of MIT wrote in an email, "I have a rather unique lecture style which they could not cover in their tests."

In the spring 2010 experiment, Wieman and his colleagues followed two nearly identical physics classes of more than 250 students that were taught the usual way three hours a week for 11 weeks. In the 12th week, one class stuck with the long-tenured and well-regarded professor in lecture mode. The second class was taught by two of Wieman's grad students using the interactive method.

The classes' test scores were nearly identical before the interactive sessions, but there was an obvious difference after the students took a 12-question quiz on what they were taught during the experimental week of instruction. Students in the interactive class got an average of 74 percent of the questions right, while those taught using traditional method scored only 41 percent.

The best scores in the traditional class were below average for the interactive class, Wieman said. In addition, student attendance and attention were higher in the interactive class.

The professor who lectured students had been sure his method would work better, and it took a while for him to get over the results, said Louis Deslauriers, one of the graduate students who taught the interactive class. But now the professor is striving to adopt the new method.

The two graduate students are co-authors of the study and knew that what they were doing was part of the research, meaning this wasn't the usual blind scientific experiment. But Wieman said that didn't affect the results of the study. Independent people monitored the students and teachers' actions in the classroom. Wieman declined to identify the veteran professor, who was a willing participant.

Wieman said the need for a more hands-on teaching approach isn't an indictment of a generation raised on video games. It has more to do with the way the brain learns, he said. This method has long worked well in individual tutoring; it's just now being applied on a grander scale, he said.

As far as professorial brilliance, there's "nothing magical about a particular person," he said.

"Lectures have been equally ineffective for centuries," the Nobelist said. "Now we have figured out ways to do it better."

___

Online: http://www.sciencemag.org

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Biologists Announce Discovery of an Entirely New Branch of Life

Maybe it's fungus, maybe it's not

In further proof that we never know just how much we don?t know, a paper published in Nature suggests that biologists in the UK have discovered an entirely new and unique branch in the tree of life. A group of mysterious microscopic organisms related to fungus are actually so different that they make up their own kind of fungal group. Another way to say that: there are so many of these distinctly different kinds of organisms living in so many diverse places, that the biodiversity among this new group might be as vast as the entire known fungal kingdom. In fact, they might not actually be fungi at all.

The scientists who have discovered this new clade--a clade is like a branch on the tree of life that consists of an organism and all of its descendants--have named it cryptomycota, which loosely means ?hidden from the kingdom Fungi? so we?re told. And indeed the cryptomycota have remained hidden from sight even though it turns out they are everywhere, living in many different environments, including freshwater lakes and sediments, as well as pond water.

While biologists estimate that they?ve only categorized and cataloged about 10 percent of all fungi in the world, they were pretty sure that they?d discovered all the major groups. Cryptomycota is so new and biologically different than other fungi that scientists have yet to characterized its life cycle precisely--which is reasonable considering this is the first time researchers have ever knowingly studied them as a completely different clade.

As such, there are a lot of questions surrounding cryptomycota. How did they evolve to survive in so many diverse environments? Does their life cycle involve developing a cell wall, or do they acquire a cell wall parasitically? And, possibly, are cryptomycota fundamentally fungi at all, or are they something completely different?

Answering questions like those is going to take a lot of time, a lot of research, a lot of papers, and likely a lot of argument in the global biological community. If an entirely new taxonomical kingdom is established and it turns out everything you learned in high school was significantly incomplete, we?ll certainly let you know.

[Ars Technica, NPR]

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Study: It's not teacher, but method that matters (AP)

WASHINGTON ? Who's better at teaching difficult physics to a class of more than 250 college students: the highly rated veteran professor using time-tested lecturing, or the inexperienced graduate students interacting with kids via devices that look like TV remotes? The answer could rattle ivy on college walls.

A study by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, now a science adviser to President Barack Obama, suggests that how you teach is more important than who does the teaching.

He found that in nearly identical classes, Canadian college students learned a lot more from teaching assistants using interactive tools than they did from a veteran professor giving a traditional lecture. The students who had to engage interactively using the TV remote-like devices scored about twice as high on a test compared to those who heard the normal lecture, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The interactive method had almost no lecturing. It involved short, small-group discussions, in-class "clicker" quizzes, demonstrations and question-answer sessions. The teachers got real-time graphic feedback on what the students were learning and what they weren't getting.

"It's really what's going on in the students' minds rather than who is instructing them," said lead researcher Carl Wieman of the University of British Columbia, who shared a Nobel physics prize in 2001. "This is clearly more effective learning. Everybody should be doing this. ... You're practicing bad teaching if you are not doing this."

The study compared just two sections of physics classes for just one week, but Wieman said the technique would work for other sciences as well, and even for history.

Previous research has produced similar results. But this study, appearing in a major scientific journal and written by a Nobel laureate, can make a big difference in the field of teaching science, said Robert Beichner, a physicist and professor of science education at North Carolina State University. Beichner, who was named the 2010 U.S. undergraduate science professor of the year by the Society for College Science Teachers, wasn't part of the study but praised Wieman's work.

"He's got the scientific chops" to make other professors consider retooling their approaches, Beichner said.

Wieman heads the science education programs at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Colorado. He's also associate director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Lloyd Armstrong, a former provost at the University of Southern California and professor of physics and education, agreed that the study shows "it's not the professor, it's not even the technology, it's the approach."

Beichner, who uses the more hands-on method himself, likened it to the difference between being told how to ride a bike vs. getting on and riding it.

A prominent proponent of the traditional physics teaching method declined to talk about the study. Walter Lewin of MIT wrote in an email, "I have a rather unique lecture style which they could not cover in their tests."

In the spring 2010 experiment, Wieman and his colleagues followed two nearly identical physics classes of more than 250 students that were taught the usual way three hours a week for 11 weeks. In the 12th week, one class stuck with the long-tenured and well-regarded professor in lecture mode. The second class was taught by two of Wieman's grad students using the interactive method.

The classes' test scores were nearly identical before the interactive sessions, but there was an obvious difference after the students took a 12-question quiz on what they were taught during the experimental week of instruction. Students in the interactive class got an average of 74 percent of the questions right, while those taught using traditional method scored only 41 percent.

The best scores in the traditional class were below average for the interactive class, Wieman said. In addition, student attendance and attention were higher in the interactive class.

The professor who lectured students had been sure his method would work better, and it took a while for him to get over the results, said Louis Deslauriers, one of the graduate students who taught the interactive class. But now the professor is striving to adopt the new method.

The two graduate students are co-authors of the study and knew that what they were doing was part of the research, meaning this wasn't the usual blind scientific experiment. But Wieman said that didn't affect the results of the study. Independent people monitored the students and teachers' actions in the classroom. Wieman declined to identify the veteran professor, who was a willing participant.

Wieman said the need for a more hands-on teaching approach isn't an indictment of a generation raised on video games. It has more to do with the way the brain learns, he said. This method has long worked well in individual tutoring; it's just now being applied on a grander scale, he said.

As far as professorial brilliance, there's "nothing magical about a particular person," he said.

"Lectures have been equally ineffective for centuries," the Nobelist said. "Now we have figured out ways to do it better."

___

Online: http://www.sciencemag.org

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The night sky in 37,440 exposures (AP)

SEATTLE ? Nick Risinger has always gazed up at the sky. But last year the amateur astronomer and photographer quit his day job as a Seattle marketing director and lugged six synchronized cameras about 60,000 miles to capture an image of the entire night sky.

Risinger, 28, set up his rack of cameras in high-elevation locales in the Western U.S. and South Africa, timing photo shoots around new moons when nights were long and dark. He programmed his six cameras to track the stars as they moved across the sky and simultaneously snapped thousands of photos.

He then stitched 37,440 exposures together into a spectacular, panoramic survey sky that he posted online two weeks ago. The photo reveals a 360-degree view of the Milky Way, planets and stars in their true natural colors. Viewers can zoom in on portions of the 5,000-megapixel image to find Orion or the Large Magellanic Cloud.

"I wanted to share what I thought was possible," said Risinger, a first-time astrophotographer. "We don't see it like this. This is much brighter. On a good night in Seattle, you'll see 20 or 30 stars. This, in its full size, you'll see 20 to 30 million. Everything is amplified."

Other sky surveys have preceded this one, including the Digitized Sky Survey, a source for Google Sky. Many serve scientific purposes and were shot in red and blue to measure the temperature of stars, Risinger said. He shot in a third color, green, to give the photo added depth and richness, he said.

"What a labor of love it is!" said Andrew Fraknoi, senior educator at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. "Professional astronomers are now doing much deeper surveys of small regions of the sky, using big telescopes. But every once in a while it's nice to step back and have such a beautiful photographic record of the whole sky."

"This is not a scientifically useful image. This is for educational and artistic appreciation," Risinger said, adding that he wasn't motivated by money but hopes to sell prints and other products to keep the website running.

To capture the entire night sky in a year, Risinger plotted out an exact schedule of images he needed from both the northern and southern hemisphere. He divided the sky into 624 uniform sections and entered those coordinates into the computer.

"The sheer amount of work was mind-boggling," he said at his apartment in Seattle. "It's not a wing-it kind of project. You have to plan how you're going to get the entire sky. And you do that by dividing it up into pieces and knowing what time you need to collect those pieces because as the Earth goes around the Sun, things come in and out of view."

In March of last year, Risinger and his older brother, Erik, traveled to the desert near Tonapah, Nev., and took the first photos of what eventually would become his Photopic Sky Survey.

When he realized the work was too monumental, Risinger quit his day job as a marketing director of a countertop company to devote himself full-time to the project. He also persuaded his retired father, Tom, who lives in Gig Harbor, Wash., to join him.

In the U.S., he and his dad would often drive all day and set up and take photographs all night. They chased ideal windows of opportunity to catch the night sky at its clearest.

Their travels took them to dark places where light pollution was low and higher altitudes where there was less water vapor ? near the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona, near Fort Davis, Tex., and Lassen National Forest in California. He found himself staking out stars in freezing temperatures in Telluride, Colo., and amid stars in South Africa where none of the constellations were recognizable to his northern hemisphere-trained eyes.

Each night, Risinger set the six cameras ? high-end monochrome astrophotography imagers equipped with different filters ? to point in the exact same spot and continuously feed his laptop with images. He monitored the photographs in real-time and passed the dark hours eating sunflower seeds. Meanwhile, his dad slept.

Back in Seattle, Risinger began piecing the panoramic image together in January. He used a computer software program to scan each frame, recognize the pattern with a database of stars and then match them with the other colors and frames. That got projected onto a sphere.

"Making an atlas of the night sky is something that mostly professional astronomers would have done in the past," said Fraknoi, who is also chairman of the astronomy department at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, Calif. "With new computer tools at our disposal, it's remarkable what amateur astronomers can discover."

Risinger finished the project a couple weeks ago, and has been getting thousands of hits on his website.

"It was always hard to describe what I was doing that would make sense to people that aren't familiar with astronomy. But once they see it, they get it."

____

Online:

http://skysurvey.org/

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Video: Japanese Speedster Robot Levitates on a Cushion of Air

It could spawn high-speed ground-effect trains

Researchers in Japan are trying to get a new kind of high speed train technology off the ground, and to prove they?re serious they?ve built a ground-effect robot that floats on a cushion of air. If their demo project works satisfactorily, it could set in motion a plan to build commuter trains that essentially fly inches from the ground, cutting friction and increasing overall efficiency.

Though on its face it sounds similar, this is not maglev. Ground-effect vehicles are more like extremely low flying airplanes that use stubby wings and the lift provided by the fast-moving air between its body and the ground to stay just a few inches aloft. As such, they are in some ways more complex than maglev trains--you have to manage for pitch, yaw, and roll as with an aircraft--but in other ways they are more simple.

For one, maglevs create a certain amount of drag between the bottom of the train and the track below that reduces efficiency. Perhaps even more daunting these days, maglevs are also extremely expensive to build.

The vehicle seen above (and below) was developed by researchers at Japan?s Tohoku University to test autonomous stabilization in a ground effects vehicle. Data collected from their model robot will be used to develop a manned experimental train that can run on a closed, U-shaped track at about 125 miles per hour. If that works, Japan will officially have a prototype of an advanced train just as fast as--and several generations ahead of--America?s fastest passenger train on a good day.

[IEEE Spectrum]

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Crab Nebula Emits Largest Gamma Ray Burst Ever Seen, Puzzles Astronomers

The Crab Nebula (And Its Enigmatic Eruption) The nebula set against a full-sky gamma ray map, showing the Crab Nebula's location in the crosshairs. NASA

Something strange is afoot in the Crab Nebula. Famous for beaming a steady dose of radiation at Earth at regular intervals thanks to the spinning neutron star at its center, the nebula has long been of interest to astronomers. So one can imagine their interest when an enormous gamma-ray flare five times more powerful than any previously detected burst from the region, making these "the highest-energy electrons known to be associated with any cosmic source," according to NASA.

The Crab Nebula is basically the remnants of a supernova located about 6,500 light years away (in Taurus, for those of you keeping tabs on the heavens at home). What was once the star?s core is now an expanding gas cloud anchored by a superdense neutron star that rotates 30 times per second, each time swinging a beam of intense radiation toward the Earth.

That?s been going on, from our perspective here, for thousands of years. And it?s been doing so with regularity, 30 times per second, ceaselessly. A handful of short-lived gamma-ray flares have been detected over the years, but nothing that fell outside the range of what?s considered normal cosmic violence.

Then, on April 12, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope--and later Italy?s AGILE satellite--picked up this monster of a flare 30 times more intense than the nebula?s normal energy output and five times more powerful than any previous uptick in energy. Four days later an even brighter flare erupted. Then, two days after that, the strange activity ceased without explanation.

Astronomers theorize that the flares must be coming from somewhere within a one-third of-a-light-year radius of that central neutron star, and that the area doing the emitting must be close to the size of our own solar system. And to offer some perspective on the energy unleashed, the electrons in these emissions must have energies some 100 times greater than the highest achievable energies in the LHC.

But what caused them is still unknown. The prevailing theory seems to be that the magnetic field around the neutron star suddenly rearranged itself, accelerating particles quickly to nearly the speed of light. As high speed electrons interact with the shifting magnetic field, gamma-rays are produced. Observations are ongoing. In the meantime, it gives us an excuse to post brilliantly pretty images of the Crab Nebula, like the one above.

[NASA]

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Teen Discovers Promising Cystic Fibrosis Treatment (LiveScience.com)

A 16-year-old from the Toronto area used a supercomputer system to find a new drug combination that shows potential in treating the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis, and won top honors for his work.

Marshall Zhang, an 11th-grade student at Richmond Hill's Bayview Secondary School, received first place Tuesday (May 10) in the 2011 Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge, a contest in which students conduct their own research projects with the help of mentors.

Cystic fibrosis is a potentially fatal condition caused by a genetic mutation, or error. It causes thick, sticky mucus to build up in the lungs and elsewhere. Cystic fibrosis occurs most among white people of northern European ancestry, in about 1 out of 3,000 live births. In the past, most people with cystic fibrosis died in their teens, according to the Mayo Clinic. It has no cure. [10 Worst Hereditary Conditions]

At his mentor's lab, Zhang used the Canadian SCINET supercomputing network to investigate how two promising new compounds acted against the defective protein responsible for the condition. Using computer simulations, he figured out how each of these drugs acted against the protein and discovered they acted on the protein in different spots, raising the possibility they could be used simultaneously without interfering with each other.

Zhang then tested his theory in living cells, and the results exceeded his expectations.

"They actually worked together in creating an effect that was greater than the sum of its parts," he told LiveScience.

Zhang is realistic about the future for his discovery; once tested in the human body, promising treatments can turn out to be toxic or ineffective, he said. But even if this combination of compounds doesn't ultimately help treat cystic fibrosis, he believes his research has laid important groundwork for other discoveries.

"I have identified certain chemical structures that are key in the corrective effects of these molecules, as well as identified two molecular targets on the protein for future therapeutics," he said.

His mentor, Dr. Christine Bear, a researcher at the Hospital for Sick Children's Research Institute in Toronto, has invited him back to her lab to continue his work, he said.

After taking Advanced Placement Biology last year, in Grade 10, Zhang decided he wanted to do what real scientists do and began contacting professors to see if he could work in their labs.

"Most of them said 'no' because I didn't have the experience I needed," he said. "I emailed the entire list of faculty in biochemistry at the University of Toronto." The last one, Dr. Bear, said yes.

Now Zhang and a trio of Montreal students who took second place for their technique for making sorbet without gelatin move on to compete against U.S. and Australian teams at the International BioGENEius Challenge in Washington, D.C., June 27.

You can follow LiveScience writer Wynne Parry on Twitter @Wynne_Parry.�Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience�and on Facebook.

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The night sky in 37,440 exposures (AP)

SEATTLE ? Nick Risinger has always gazed up at the sky. But last year the amateur astronomer and photographer quit his day job as a Seattle marketing director and lugged six synchronized cameras about 60,000 miles to capture an image of the entire night sky.

Risinger, 28, set up his rack of cameras in high-elevation locales in the Western U.S. and South Africa, timing photo shoots around new moons when nights were long and dark. He programmed his six cameras to track the stars as they moved across the sky and simultaneously snapped thousands of photos.

He then stitched 37,440 exposures together into a spectacular, panoramic survey sky that he posted online two weeks ago. The photo reveals a 360-degree view of the Milky Way, planets and stars in their true natural colors. Viewers can zoom in on portions of the 5,000-megapixel image to find Orion or the Large Magellanic Cloud.

"I wanted to share what I thought was possible," said Risinger, a first-time astrophotographer. "We don't see it like this. This is much brighter. On a good night in Seattle, you'll see 20 or 30 stars. This, in its full size, you'll see 20 to 30 million. Everything is amplified."

Other sky surveys have preceded this one, including the Digitized Sky Survey, a source for Google Sky. Many serve scientific purposes and were shot in red and blue to measure the temperature of stars, Risinger said. He shot in a third color, green, to give the photo added depth and richness, he said.

"What a labor of love it is!" said Andrew Fraknoi, senior educator at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. "Professional astronomers are now doing much deeper surveys of small regions of the sky, using big telescopes. But every once in a while it's nice to step back and have such a beautiful photographic record of the whole sky."

"This is not a scientifically useful image. This is for educational and artistic appreciation," Risinger said, adding that he wasn't motivated by money but hopes to sell prints and other products to keep the website running.

To capture the entire night sky in a year, Risinger plotted out an exact schedule of images he needed from both the northern and southern hemisphere. He divided the sky into 624 uniform sections and entered those coordinates into the computer.

"The sheer amount of work was mind-boggling," he said at his apartment in Seattle. "It's not a wing-it kind of project. You have to plan how you're going to get the entire sky. And you do that by dividing it up into pieces and knowing what time you need to collect those pieces because as the Earth goes around the Sun, things come in and out of view."

In March of last year, Risinger and his older brother, Erik, traveled to the desert near Tonapah, Nev., and took the first photos of what eventually would become his Photopic Sky Survey.

When he realized the work was too monumental, Risinger quit his day job as a marketing director of a countertop company to devote himself full-time to the project. He also persuaded his retired father, Tom, who lives in Gig Harbor, Wash., to join him.

In the U.S., he and his dad would often drive all day and set up and take photographs all night. They chased ideal windows of opportunity to catch the night sky at its clearest.

Their travels took them to dark places where light pollution was low and higher altitudes where there was less water vapor ? near the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona, near Fort Davis, Tex., and Lassen National Forest in California. He found himself staking out stars in freezing temperatures in Telluride, Colo., and amid stars in South Africa where none of the constellations were recognizable to his northern hemisphere-trained eyes.

Each night, Risinger set the six cameras ? high-end monochrome astrophotography imagers equipped with different filters ? to point in the exact same spot and continuously feed his laptop with images. He monitored the photographs in real-time and passed the dark hours eating sunflower seeds. Meanwhile, his dad slept.

Back in Seattle, Risinger began piecing the panoramic image together in January. He used a computer software program to scan each frame, recognize the pattern with a database of stars and then match them with the other colors and frames. That got projected onto a sphere.

"Making an atlas of the night sky is something that mostly professional astronomers would have done in the past," said Fraknoi, who is also chairman of the astronomy department at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, Calif. "With new computer tools at our disposal, it's remarkable what amateur astronomers can discover."

Risinger finished the project a couple weeks ago, and has been getting thousands of hits on his website.

"It was always hard to describe what I was doing that would make sense to people that aren't familiar with astronomy. But once they see it, they get it."

____

Online:

http://skysurvey.org/

scientific american space news web of science science science news

The night sky in 37,440 exposures (AP)

SEATTLE ? Nick Risinger has always gazed up at the sky. But last year the amateur astronomer and photographer quit his day job as a Seattle marketing director and lugged six synchronized cameras about 60,000 miles to capture an image of the entire night sky.

Risinger, 28, set up his rack of cameras in high-elevation locales in the Western U.S. and South Africa, timing photo shoots around new moons when nights were long and dark. He programmed his six cameras to track the stars as they moved across the sky and simultaneously snapped thousands of photos.

He then stitched 37,440 exposures together into a spectacular, panoramic survey sky that he posted online two weeks ago. The photo reveals a 360-degree view of the Milky Way, planets and stars in their true natural colors. Viewers can zoom in on portions of the 5,000-megapixel image to find Orion or the Large Magellanic Cloud.

"I wanted to share what I thought was possible," said Risinger, a first-time astrophotographer. "We don't see it like this. This is much brighter. On a good night in Seattle, you'll see 20 or 30 stars. This, in its full size, you'll see 20 to 30 million. Everything is amplified."

Other sky surveys have preceded this one, including the Digitized Sky Survey, a source for Google Sky. Many serve scientific purposes and were shot in red and blue to measure the temperature of stars, Risinger said. He shot in a third color, green, to give the photo added depth and richness, he said.

"What a labor of love it is!" said Andrew Fraknoi, senior educator at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. "Professional astronomers are now doing much deeper surveys of small regions of the sky, using big telescopes. But every once in a while it's nice to step back and have such a beautiful photographic record of the whole sky."

"This is not a scientifically useful image. This is for educational and artistic appreciation," Risinger said, adding that he wasn't motivated by money but hopes to sell prints and other products to keep the website running.

To capture the entire night sky in a year, Risinger plotted out an exact schedule of images he needed from both the northern and southern hemisphere. He divided the sky into 624 uniform sections and entered those coordinates into the computer.

"The sheer amount of work was mind-boggling," he said at his apartment in Seattle. "It's not a wing-it kind of project. You have to plan how you're going to get the entire sky. And you do that by dividing it up into pieces and knowing what time you need to collect those pieces because as the Earth goes around the Sun, things come in and out of view."

In March of last year, Risinger and his older brother, Erik, traveled to the desert near Tonapah, Nev., and took the first photos of what eventually would become his Photopic Sky Survey.

When he realized the work was too monumental, Risinger quit his day job as a marketing director of a countertop company to devote himself full-time to the project. He also persuaded his retired father, Tom, who lives in Gig Harbor, Wash., to join him.

In the U.S., he and his dad would often drive all day and set up and take photographs all night. They chased ideal windows of opportunity to catch the night sky at its clearest.

Their travels took them to dark places where light pollution was low and higher altitudes where there was less water vapor ? near the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona, near Fort Davis, Tex., and Lassen National Forest in California. He found himself staking out stars in freezing temperatures in Telluride, Colo., and amid stars in South Africa where none of the constellations were recognizable to his northern hemisphere-trained eyes.

Each night, Risinger set the six cameras ? high-end monochrome astrophotography imagers equipped with different filters ? to point in the exact same spot and continuously feed his laptop with images. He monitored the photographs in real-time and passed the dark hours eating sunflower seeds. Meanwhile, his dad slept.

Back in Seattle, Risinger began piecing the panoramic image together in January. He used a computer software program to scan each frame, recognize the pattern with a database of stars and then match them with the other colors and frames. That got projected onto a sphere.

"Making an atlas of the night sky is something that mostly professional astronomers would have done in the past," said Fraknoi, who is also chairman of the astronomy department at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, Calif. "With new computer tools at our disposal, it's remarkable what amateur astronomers can discover."

Risinger finished the project a couple weeks ago, and has been getting thousands of hits on his website.

"It was always hard to describe what I was doing that would make sense to people that aren't familiar with astronomy. But once they see it, they get it."

____

Online:

http://skysurvey.org/

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Video: New ZeroTouch Interface is a Touchscreen Without the Screen

At the Computer Human Interaction conference in B.C. this week, a team from Texas A&M University unveiled a touch screen technology they?ve been incubating for a couple of years that isn?t really a screen at all. ZeroTouch, as the project is known, is more like an empty picture frame lined with LEDs and filled with criss-crossing beams of infrared light. Like a mashup of traditional 2-D touch interface with the 3-D applications of, say, Microsoft?s Kinect, its applications are many.

The design seems so simple that it?s almost surprising we haven?t seen something like this until now. ZeroTouch is basically an empty window pane, and the LEDs and IR sensors mounted around its edges detect anything that crosses the plane of that frame (it can recognize up to 20 independent touch points at a time). It doesn?t just register that something is there, but also the size of the object--whether it?s a finger, an entire hand, a tiny stylus, etc.--and whether it is rotating or twisting (this is better explained visually in the video below).

Since ZeroTouch allows a user not only to touch but to reach through the ?screen,? it opens itself to numberless applications. Laid on a flat surface, it can be used as a drawing board or a drafting stylus. Placed over any conventional screen, it instantly and inexpensively turns it into a touch screen. Or it can be suspended in space so the user can actually reach through it, offering it a 3-D capability that other touch screen interfaces lack.

So far, such 3-D applications haven?t really been exploited beyond a pretty straightforward painting program, but the possibilities are there. The Aggies behind ZeroTouch next plan to create a layered device wherein multiple screens are stacked atop one another, giving it a greater degree of depth of control.

See it work in the IDG report below.

[PhysOrg]

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Video: New ZeroTouch Interface is a Touchscreen Without the Screen

At the Computer Human Interaction conference in B.C. this week, a team from Texas A&M University unveiled a touch screen technology they?ve been incubating for a couple of years that isn?t really a screen at all. ZeroTouch, as the project is known, is more like an empty picture frame lined with LEDs and filled with criss-crossing beams of infrared light. Like a mashup of traditional 2-D touch interface with the 3-D applications of, say, Microsoft?s Kinect, its applications are many.

The design seems so simple that it?s almost surprising we haven?t seen something like this until now. ZeroTouch is basically an empty window pane, and the LEDs and IR sensors mounted around its edges detect anything that crosses the plane of that frame (it can recognize up to 20 independent touch points at a time). It doesn?t just register that something is there, but also the size of the object--whether it?s a finger, an entire hand, a tiny stylus, etc.--and whether it is rotating or twisting (this is better explained visually in the video below).

Since ZeroTouch allows a user not only to touch but to reach through the ?screen,? it opens itself to numberless applications. Laid on a flat surface, it can be used as a drawing board or a drafting stylus. Placed over any conventional screen, it instantly and inexpensively turns it into a touch screen. Or it can be suspended in space so the user can actually reach through it, offering it a 3-D capability that other touch screen interfaces lack.

So far, such 3-D applications haven?t really been exploited beyond a pretty straightforward painting program, but the possibilities are there. The Aggies behind ZeroTouch next plan to create a layered device wherein multiple screens are stacked atop one another, giving it a greater degree of depth of control.

See it work in the IDG report below.

[PhysOrg]

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Video: Ranger Robot Sets New Distance Record, Walking 40 Miles on a Single Charge

Ranger Extends Its Range

Cornell?s Ranger Robot, world record holder for the longest walk by a robot on a single charge, has smashed its own personal best by logging 40.5 miles without stopping, recharging, or even being touched. Over the course of almost 31 hours, Ranger ambled along at a not-so-blazing 1.3 miles per hour for 397.75 laps around a running track, but managed to make the whole trek using just a nickel?s worth of electricity.

The robot?s previous record, set in July of last year, was just 14.3 miles. Ranger?s handlers at Cornell were able to squeeze more mileage out of their robot by improving its efficiency through better overall control. Ranger gets by on far less power than most legged robots because, for the most part, its legs swing freely, catching the robot as it falls forward and pushing it into its next step.

So while watching Ranger go may not be the most exciting thing going in robotics right now, the waist-tall little ?bot is something of a feat in consistency and efficiency. After all, it made 186,076 steps while covering more than 40 miles in this latest attempt, and never missed a step. That?s better than most humans can say.

Cue the Chariots of Fire and watch Ranger go in the video below. Of particular anti-climactic interest: the big finish, at the 3:40 mark.

[PhysOrg]

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The World's Biggest Consumer 3-D TV Costs a Thousand Dollars an Inch

Bang & Olufsen 4-85 B&O

Our sister publication, the AV wizards (it's not a club, really) over at Sound & Vision, got a glimpse of B&O's newest, record-breaking, ludicrously-priced 4-85 TV. At 85 inches, it's the world's biggest consumer 3-D TV, and at $85,000, one of the most expensive. It displays 3-D in full 1080p and even has a stand into which the screen retracts. Biggest and most expensive doesn't always mean best, but S&V seemed quite pleased with the quality of the set. Check out their writeup for more information (and, of course, some pretty pictures). [S&V]

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Earlier HIV therapy protects against virus spread (AP)

WASHINGTON ? Treating HIV right away, before patients are too sick, dramatically lowers their chances of spreading the AIDS virus to a sexual partner, says a major international study that may convince more doctors to offer medication sooner.

The nine-nation study offers convincing evidence of what scientists have long believed ? that HIV medicines don't just benefit the patient, but may act as a preventive by making those people less infectious. Earlier treatment in the study meant patients were 96 percent less likely to spread the virus to their uninfected partners, according to preliminary results announced Thursday by the National Institutes of Health, which oversaw the research.

Those findings were striking enough that the NIH said it was stopping the study four years ahead of schedule to get the word out.

When HIV patients should start taking antiviral drugs is an important question. The pills are lifesaving but also expensive ? up to $15,000 a year in the U.S. ? and carry a range of side effects from diarrhea to liver damage.

NIH's Dr. Anthony Fauci said the new study promises to change practice worldwide. In developing countries, where the drugs cost a few hundred dollars a year, patients tend to be far sicker before getting medication. Even in the U.S., where therapy starts sooner, doctors don't always treat as early as was done in this study.

"It has less to do with a decision about what's good for you from a personal health standpoint than what is the extra added benefit from starting earlier, i.e., transmission, especially if you have a partner who's uninfected," said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Condoms remain crucial for protection ? the medications don't change that longtime recommendation. All 1,763 couples in the study, where one partner had HIV and the other didn't, were urged to use them.

"HIV-positive people cannot assume they are not infectious simply because they are already on treatment medications," warned Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Previous research has suggested that HIV patients who use the medications are less likely to spread infection. But the $73 million study announced Thursday is the first to rigorously test that.

The couples, most of whom were heterosexual, were randomly divided. Among half, the HIV-infected partner started medication immediately after diagnosis. Among the other half, the infected partner delayed using the drugs until his or her level of CD4 cells ? a way to measure the strength of the immune system ? dropped below 250 or symptoms appeared.

In 28 couples, the uninfected person became infected by their partner. Only one of those infections occurred among the couples where the infected person was treated early, Fauci said.

The other 27 cases in which HIV spread involved couples that delayed drug treatment.

Importantly, more than half of those infections occurred when the patient's CD4 count remained greater than 350, Fauci noted. That number indicates only moderate immune damage. Most developing countries don't offer treatment until CD4 levels dip lower than that.

U.S. guidelines recently were changed to recommend that treatment begin when that immune system number is below 500, although many doctors haven't yet begun following that advice, said Dr. Michael Horberg of the HIV Medicine Association and HIV/AIDS director for Kaiser Permanente. Some experts would treat even sooner.

The earlier treatment also helped reduce some complications ? such as a form of tuberculosis ? in the original patients, but there was no significant difference in deaths between the two groups.

The study included couples from Botswana, Brazil, India, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Thailand, Zimbabwe, as well as a few from the United States.

___

Online:

NIH: http://www.niaid.nih.gov

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Task Force Reports No Major Safety Issues at U.S. Nuclear Plants After Month of Study (ContributorNetwork)

According to Reuters, a government-assigned task force in charge of assessing the current state of nuclear energy in the country has reported that, after a month of work, it has not found any major problems with any of the country's 104 nuclear power plants.

The federal task force went into action following the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster that occurred in March following an 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rocked Japan. The goal of the panel of experts is to look at where things failed at Fukushima and see if there are any similar risks at U.S. nuclear power plants. According to CNN, the task force was designed to complete a three-month study; so far, it is one month in. At the end of the three-month period, the task force will present its findings and any recommended changes or problems it might have with nuclear power plants in the U.S.

The CNN article also included a statement from task force leader Charles Miller, who spoke with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Thursday. Miller said:

"As we stand today, the task force has not identified any issues that we think would undermine our confidence in the continued safety and emergency planning for nuclear plants in this country. That said, we do expect that we're likely to have findings and recommendations that will further enhance the safety of the nuclear plants in this country."

According to Dow Jones Newswires, the meeting Thursday between the task force, which consists of five experts, and theNuclear Regulatory Commission was the first in a series of meetings set to take place. Additionally, the task force has made its findings so far available to the public and noted it will most likely have recommendations on how to enhance safety preparation for nuclear power plants once the study is completed. After the panel releases safety recommendations, U.S. officials could take swift action to make sure the precautions are implemented in the country's 104 nuclear reactors.

After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, in which the power plant's cooling system failed, many states that utilize nuclear energy began looking at their safety plans and disaster preparations. Some states also put their plans to build more reactors on hold until nuclear energy was completely reassessed in the country and their individual state.

Rachel Krech provides an in-depth look at current environmental issues and local Chicago news stories. As a college student from the Chicago suburbs pursuing two science degrees, she applies her knowledge and passion to both topics to garner further public awareness.

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Task Force Reports No Major Safety Issues at U.S. Nuclear Plants After Month of Study (ContributorNetwork)

According to Reuters, a government-assigned task force in charge of assessing the current state of nuclear energy in the country has reported that, after a month of work, it has not found any major problems with any of the country's 104 nuclear power plants.

The federal task force went into action following the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster that occurred in March following an 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rocked Japan. The goal of the panel of experts is to look at where things failed at Fukushima and see if there are any similar risks at U.S. nuclear power plants. According to CNN, the task force was designed to complete a three-month study; so far, it is one month in. At the end of the three-month period, the task force will present its findings and any recommended changes or problems it might have with nuclear power plants in the U.S.

The CNN article also included a statement from task force leader Charles Miller, who spoke with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Thursday. Miller said:

"As we stand today, the task force has not identified any issues that we think would undermine our confidence in the continued safety and emergency planning for nuclear plants in this country. That said, we do expect that we're likely to have findings and recommendations that will further enhance the safety of the nuclear plants in this country."

According to Dow Jones Newswires, the meeting Thursday between the task force, which consists of five experts, and theNuclear Regulatory Commission was the first in a series of meetings set to take place. Additionally, the task force has made its findings so far available to the public and noted it will most likely have recommendations on how to enhance safety preparation for nuclear power plants once the study is completed. After the panel releases safety recommendations, U.S. officials could take swift action to make sure the precautions are implemented in the country's 104 nuclear reactors.

After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, in which the power plant's cooling system failed, many states that utilize nuclear energy began looking at their safety plans and disaster preparations. Some states also put their plans to build more reactors on hold until nuclear energy was completely reassessed in the country and their individual state.

Rachel Krech provides an in-depth look at current environmental issues and local Chicago news stories. As a college student from the Chicago suburbs pursuing two science degrees, she applies her knowledge and passion to both topics to garner further public awareness.

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Props aplenty in Senate show on big oil tax breaks (AP)

WASHINGTON ? The hearing was for verbally flogging oil company CEOs, and no senator bothered to pretend it was about making gasoline prices more affordable or helping the economy recover. Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch set the tone Thursday when he opened with a portrait of a dog sitting on a pony.

Sen. Charles Schumer countered with a reference to a unicorn. Sen. Pat Roberts suggested a rhinoceros. It was a fit opening for a show where the oil executives served as props for politicians needing to show voters that they, too, are angry about $4 a gallon gasoline.

"This is not going to change the price at the gas pump," Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus admitted as he gaveled the proceedings to a close.

"I grant you," the Montana Democrat added, "we've got to develop an energy policy in this country."

The hearing didn't get Congress any closer to doing that. But it did provide Senate Democrats a televised chance to challenge the nation's five largest oil companies to defend their generous tax breaks amid huge profits. At issue, Democrats said, was a bill by Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., to repeal the tax breaks granted to the five companies testifying.

Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon played a video of a 2005 congressional hearing in which oil company executives said they didn't need generous tax breaks because oil was then selling at $55 a barrel. As the hearing commenced, the price per barrel hovered just below $100.

"You all said you didn't need them in 2005," Wyden said. "You seem to be telling a different story today."

Chevron Corp. chairman and CEO John Watson said the companies don't want special tax benefits ? just the benefits that other industries get.

ConocoPhillips chairman Jim Mulva said a tax increase on oil companies would cost jobs, discourage investment and lead to even higher gas prices. But several of his fellow CEOs weren't as willing to make a direct link between eliminating the tax breaks and higher fuel costs.

"It's hard to make definitive statements around prices because part of the conversation today was around all of the elements that go into the volatility of prices," Marvin Odum, president of Shell Oil Co., said after the hearing. "There's so many factors you can't say a definitive impact."

What the oil company chiefs had to say was not the focus for majority Democrats eager to demonstrate before the 2012 election that they stand with consumers against big oil companies ? and those Republicans who support them. Republicans weren't will to make it that easy, however.

"All this hearing is about is providing a justification for tax increases," said Hatch, framed by the dog-and-pony portrait behind him.

"For the president and some of my colleagues," the Republican said, "the answer is always raise taxes. Government spends too much? Raise some taxes. Health care too expensive? Raise some taxes. Gas prices too expensive? I've got it ... let's raise some taxes."

Schumer said that saying a hugely profitable industry should continue taking billions of dollars in tax breaks is as credible as the suggestion that "a unicorn just flew into this hearing room."

It's "very difficult to follow the unicorn from New York. Who has a very sharp horn," said the next senator to speak, Roberts, R-Kan. Sometimes, he said, a unicorn can morph into a rhinoceros. "And you don't want to mess with a rhinoceros."

The elephant in the hearing room was the role that rising gas prices are playing as a pocketbook issue in the early stages of the 2012 elections. House Republicans on Thursday were holding votes on a string of bills to speed up and expand offshore drilling to lessen the country's dependence on foreign oil. President Barack Obama has called for eliminating tax breaks for all oil and gas companies, raising about $44 billion over the next decade.

Lawmakers, including Democrats from oil-producing states, complained that Obama's proposal would raise taxes on many small and medium-sized businesses involved in oil production. The Menendez bill, which would raise about $21 billion over the same period, targets only the five largest oil companies.

Thursday's marquee hearing featured the CEOs of Shell Oil Co., ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, BP America and Chevron Corp., which together booked profits totaling $36 billion during the first quarter. The Democrats say that with profits that high, the big oil companies wouldn't miss tax breaks that average $2 billion a year.

"My guess is you will be able to protect yourselves. ...You're used to prevailing," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. Oil companies, he added, are "deeply and profoundly committed to sharing nothing."

Gasoline prices are above $4 a gallon in much of the country. The national average is about $3.98 for regular unleaded, up from $2.90 a gallon a year ago, according to AAA.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concluded that eliminating the tax breaks would be unlikely to result in higher gasoline prices, which are influenced by a host of factors. The report, released Wednesday, said eliminating the tax breaks would raise about $1.2 billion in 2012. By comparison, the five oil companies had combined revenues of $1.5 trillion last year.

Menendez's bill has a dubious future beyond a talking point.

Republicans, who now control the House and have enough votes to block legislation in the Senate, oppose tax increases. They are joined on this issue by a handful of Democrats, mainly from oil-producing states. Seven Senate Democrats teamed with Republicans to defeat a tax proposal similar to Obama's in February.

"Why are we here?" Hatch said at one point.

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Video: Telepresence Balloon Lets Your Boss's Face Watchfully Follow You Everywhere

Telepresence Blimp New Scientist

For some reason, telepresence--the concept of having your person (in audio and/or video form) represented by some kind of machine while you are physically elsewhere--has lent itself to extreme goofiness. It's not really a goofy idea, and yet we've seen squishy larval phones, shoulder-mounted robots, the Anybots robot (which recently ordered coffee in a Palo Alto shop), and now this blimp-like thing from Sony that projects your face onto what's essentially a motorized balloon.

Created by Tobita Hiroaki and his team at Sony, the blimp (which is still nameless) shows a projection of the telepresence-r's face on a meter-wide balloon. (Hiroaki says his colleagues find talking to such a large floating head "very strange.") It works generally like all blimps do, powered by a few small propellers located underneath the balloon. It's controlled remotely, with a webcam on the user's face updating live, and broadcasts audio through a built-in speaker.

The idea is to solve a problem most telepresence robots, like the Anybots, have: stairs. Getting a robot to climb stairs is a hell of a challenge, and to keep costs down, telepresence robots like the Anybots robot generally just use non-stair-compatible wheels. So why not merely float over them instead? The project is still very much in development, but could be pretty useful for remote monitoring and things like that. Hopefully it works better than our recent misadventure in telepresence, regardless of how much we enjoyed the frustrated liveblog.

[New Scientist]

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Shuttle crew at space center for next launch (Reuters)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) ? Space shuttle Endeavour commander Mark Kelly and his crew returned to the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday to prepare for a second launch attempt to the International Space Station.

Endeavour is scheduled to lift off on NASA's 134th and next-to-last shuttle mission Monday at 8:56 a.m. local time.

"It's great to be back," Kelly said. "Four days from now we should all be strapped in and ready to go. Hopefully the weather will be good."

Endeavour's first launch attempt on April 29 was called off about four hours before liftoff when engineers detected a problem with a heating system in one of the ship's onboard power units. Technicians replaced an electronics switching box and rewired the circuit.

Kelly's wife, the recuperating U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, was due to return to Florida later in the week to watch the launch.

Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, was nearly killed in a mass shooting January 8 that killed six people. She is undergoing rehabilitation in Houston. Her first excursion since the shooting was to Florida for Endeavour's April 29 attempt.

The shuttle will be delivering a $2 billion particle physics experiment called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.

NASA is retiring its three-ship shuttle fleet this summer due to high operating costs and to develop spaceships that can travel beyond the station's 220-mile-high orbit. The U.S. space agency expects to unveil its plan for a new launcher in June, said Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana.

(Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Jerry Norton)

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Chemists Design Method to Figure Out What Your Meat Ate

Foodies want to know everything about their animal-based dishes these days ? where the meat came from, what it ate, what its name was. OK, maybe not that last part. But there is a big difference between industrial cattle farms and grass-fed meat ? both in price and in nutritional considerations.

We?ve already seen how chemistry can help monitor the source of your meals, ensuring that you don?t eat endangered species. Now you can tell what your beef ate before it reached your plate.

A group of chemists from Ireland figured out a way to reconstruct the diet of cattle, determining whether they spent their days munching fresh pasture grasses rather than barley or silage. Frank J. Monahan and colleagues studied the proportions of stable isotopes of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and sulfur found in the muscle tissue and tail hair of Irish beef cattle. They were able to determine what the animals primarily ate, and in some cases, could even figure out where the animals came from.

Certain diets yielded a distinctive signature, the researchers report in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. They couldn?t tell between animals that ate from a pasture and those that ate grass silage, but there were clear differences between animals that ate pasture grass and those that ate concentrated food products. Using hair and tail samples, they could even follow changes in an animal?s diet over the course of its lifetime. The researchers could tell whether a steer had switched from a grass diet to a corn-based diet near the end of its life, for instance.

Monitoring animals? tail hair yielded such precise information about diet that it could be used to monitor farms? production practices, the authors say.

Stable isotope ratios have also been used to determine the source of bottled drinks, and figure out where people have been based on chemicals left behind in their hair.

Speaking of soft drinks, chemists also announced this week that they're using protein analysis to test for kola nuts, a pricey ingredient found in natural cola drinks. Drinks containing the kola nut had the signature of plant proteins, while Coca Cola ? which does not claim to use the kola nut ? did not.

Testing methods like these could give consumers assurances that they really are getting what they pay for.

[Eurekalert]

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Astronauts back for next-to-last shuttle flight (AP)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. ? The astronauts for NASA's next-to-last space shuttle flight returned to Florida on Thursday for another try at launching to the International Space Station.

The six crewmen ? led by the husband of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords ? arrived at Kennedy Space Center a day before the countdown clocks begin ticking again.

Shuttle Endeavour is due to blast off Monday morning. The first launch attempt on April 29 was halted by electrical trouble. A switch box was replaced, and new wiring installed.

In brief remarks after the crew's arrival, commander Mark Kelly said the launch director has assured him that Endeavour is "in great condition."

Aboard Endeavour is a $2 billion particle physics detector that will be attached to the space station. The 16-day flight also will feature the delivery of station spare parts, as well as four spacewalks that will be the last for the 30-year shuttle program. Atlantis closes out the shuttle era with a flight in July.

Kelly's wife was critically wounded in the head four months ago at a Tucson, Ariz., political event. The Arizona congresswoman recovered well enough to travel from Houston for her husband's first launch effort. She will return to Kennedy later this week, along with the other astronauts' families.

Her staff said she will return to Houston to continue rehab, shortly after liftoff. She is a member of the House committee on science, space and technology.

Astronaut Gregory Chamitoff commended Kelly for giving the mission his all, and called him "truly an amazing commander."

"We all know Mark's been through a lot the past few months," Chamitoff told journalists. "All of us feel really, really lucky to have him guide us through this complex mission."

"Appreciate that," Kelly said. "We are really excited to be here, excited to launch hopefully on Monday if the weather holds."

Forecasters put the odds of acceptable conditions at 70 percent. Launch time is 8:56 a.m.

Pilot Gregory Johnson celebrated his 49th birthday Thursday.

"I can't think of a more perfect way to spend my birthday" than get ready for the flight, Johnson said.

Endeavour is the youngest shuttle in the fleet. It was built to replace the shuttle Challenger, destroyed in a 1986 launch accident, and first flew in 1992. This will be its 25th flight and the 134th overall for the shuttle program.

___

Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

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Hackintosh Diaries, Part Two: Choosing and Assembling Your Hardware

In part two of our three-part Hackintosh guide, we'll walk you through the most complex step: selecting all the individual components for your homebuilt OS X PC

It's the Batmobile! The Radeon HD 5770 Card I used for my system has a creative heatsink. John Mahoney

OK, so you've decided to build a Hackintosh PC from scratch. Here in part two of our three-part Hackintosh guide, we'll ease the confusion of what could be the most time-consuming and arduous part of the entire process: browsing hardware catalog sites for hours trying to choose the components that will become your new machine.

Choosing hardware for your Hackintosh is confusing because for each primary component--your motherboard, CPU, graphics card, memory modules, optical drive, and anything else you choose to install--there are literally thousands of choices. So let's narrow that down, shall we? The mission here is to choose components that OS X will recognize and accept with little or no custom configuration.

The most important two components by far--95 percent of the compatibility battle according to Tonymac, the author of the Hackintosh-enabling software we're using for this guide--are the motherboard and graphics card. The motherboard is important because it presents yet another subset of even more choices. Motherboard manufacturers choose from several different CPU sockets, network controllers, audio chipsets, USB interfaces and more for each model motherboard they produce, each with its own degree of OS X compatibility. And graphics cards can also be powered by a dizzying variety of chipsets from both Nvidia and ATI/AMD, each requiring specialized drivers to tap into their full capabilities.

Thankfully, the community that has formed around MultiBeast has done almost all of the work for you by documenting specific hardware setups that have been proven to work well. On the forums, and on tonymacx86.com, there are many complete system configurations with confirmed support, spanning the full range of power levels for every budget. Now, you just need to choose which system model to follow! Which can be harder than it sounds.

Hardware on the Table: Not pictured; my graphics card. Otherwise, this is all you need to build a Hackintosh �John Mahoney

For my build, I followed this guide originally produced by MacMan, Tonymac's co-developer who now maintains MultiBeast (MultiBeast, if you recall from part one, is the software tool that makes this all possible). I adhered to my general computer-buying dictum and went for as much power as I could afford at the time, so I opted for one of Intel's most powerful non-server processors in the 3.06 GHz Core i7 950. Add to that 6GB of RAM, a solid-state startup drive, and a powerful graphics card, and we're talking about a pretty powerful machine. The complete system, including a new 23" LCD monitor, rang up to a grand total of $1,295.86 on Newegg.com in December 2010 (not including rebates). Compare that to a $2,499 price tag on a similarly equipped Mac Pro (without monitor and SSD). Not bad at all.

For a closer look and specific notes on each component I used, check out the gallery below:

Click to launch the photo gallery

If you're looking for a less powerful, cheaper machine, or something that fits in a smaller enclosure, there are numerous such guides in Tonymac's forums and on his site. For fear of this guide's scope spiraling out of control, I'm going to stick mostly to this set of hardware. But before we get specific, we'll cover some of the general concepts surrounding what types of hardware are best suited for Hackintoshing. So if you need to deviate from my system here, you'll be prepared.

Recognition vs. Compatibility

A simple rule to follow in choosing hardware is that if the component has been used by Apple in an iMac or Mac Pro, chances are it will do well in your Hackintosh system. For instance, the current line of Mac Pros use an ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card, so I went with a card that uses the same Radeon 5770 chipset. If it's in one of Apple's machines, there's a good, reliable device driver for it somewhere--most likely built into OS X itself. So that's good.

But there is a slight catch. To use that reliable driver, your Hackintosh must first recognize that your graphics card even exists. In my case, the latest version of Chimera, the software that sits between a PC's startup BIOS and OS X, now provides full enabling of any Radeon 5xxx chipset. You won't need to worry about this too much, but knowing about this distinction between recognition and compatibility cleared up a lot of my confusion regarding why even hardware with OS X drivers didn't "just work" with my Hackintosh. It has to be recognized by the system first.

Which Motherboard?

An important part of the Hackintosh configuration process (which we'll cover in the third and final installment tomorrow) is employing a file called a Differentiated System Description Table (DSDT). A DSDT is essentially a roadmap of your motherboard that OS X reads to know what hardware you have inside your machine, and how to use it. Each motherboard has a unique file, which also depends on the revision of the board you have and the firmware or BIOS version you have installed. Yikes! Luckily, it's easy to check which version of the motherboard you have, which is as much figuring out as you need to do. Tonymac's DSDT database has pre-configured files to download.

The Tonymac folks tend to lean toward Gigabyte brand motherboards, and the DSDT files for most of the popular Gigabyte boards have been tested and confirmed in the database. So unless you're prepared for some complications, stick with Gigabyte for your motherboard.

Which Graphics Card?

One confusing part about choosing a graphics card is that there isn't just "one" Radeon HD 5770 card made by ATI to buy. ATI makes the chipset, which is then used by a huge number of manufacturers (like Gigabyte, Asus, etc) on cards of their own design. So once you've picked a chipset, you still have to figure out which card to buy.

The trick is staying close to ATI's or Nvidia's "reference design"--more on which can be read here. But if you stick to the Gigabyte Radeon HD 5770 card I used (the one that looks like a Batmobile!) you should be fine.

Solid-State Drives

You want one! See the component list for more on that.

Inside the Case: A look inside once all components have been installed. �John Mahoney

Actually Building the Damn Thing

Thankfully, building your Hackintosh is just like building any other Windows PC--you don't have to do anything special. If you've never done it before, you're going to have a fun time, I can pretty much guarantee. You'll be best served by reading the manual for each component to make sure everything is installed according to plan, but in general, every component of your machine needs a power connection and a data connection. And there may be a few screws to anchor it in place. That's it--truly nothing to be intimidated by.

Power connection wires emerge from the power supply inside the case, and generally speaking, if the connector fits in the plug on the back of your component, it's the correct one. Hard drives and disc drives almost all use a SATA power connector, which looks like this. If, like me, you want to install a few extra hard drives, you might need some Molex to SATA power adapters to mate your power supply's old Molex leads to a SATA drive. Beyond that, your graphics card will have a dedicated power lead from the power supply, as will the motherboard. The instructions should indicate which is which clearly.

For data connections, you'll use SATA data cables (these come packaged with your motherboard) for disks and drives, and your graphics card, memory modules, etc. will pop into the motherboard's dedicated slots.

Be prepared to troubleshoot. When I first turned my machine on, I didn't get any video. After restarting with each of my three RAM modules installed individually to check for bad RAM (a frequent issue), I realized that I had neglected to connect my video card's power cable to the board. Whoops! Luckily, this was easily fixed. If you run into problems, try to isolate each potentially problematic component until you find the culprit.

If this is your first time building a PC, I wholeheartedly recommend Lifehacker's excellent guide for beginning PC builders for more guidance.

And that should about cover the hardware end of it. For a closer look at the components I used for my system, see the gallery here. And stay tuned for Part 3 tomorrow, where we install and configure OS X (yesterday's part one can be found here). Happy hackintoshing!

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