ScienceBlog.com

It appears that I’m not the only one to wonder whether climate change will be an issue in the 2008 U. S. Presidential election.

I’ve updated the News page of my Science Shelf website with links to four new reviews by three critics about math and mathematicians, physics and metaphysics, and alternative medicine.

You can also discover my current reading list about clones and clouds. Here’s a sampling:

Using the eyes of insects such as dragonflies and houseflies as models, a team of bioengineers at University of California, Berkeley, has created a series of artificial compound eyes. These eyes can eventually be used as cameras or sensory detectors to capture visual or chemical information from a wider field of vision than previously possible, even with the best fish-eye lens.

“Every day, more than a metric ton of meteoroids hits the Moon,” says Bill Cooke of the Marshall Space Flight Center’s Meteoroid Environment Office. They literally fall out of the sky, in all shapes and sizes, from specks of comet dust to full-blown asteroids, traveling up to a hundred thousand mph. And when they hit, they do not disintegrate harmlessly in the atmosphere as most would on Earth. On the airless Moon, meteoroids hit the ground.

In a mixing of pasta metaphors, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scientists have used electrostatic attraction to layer reactive biological molecules lasagna-like around spaghetti-like carbon nanotubes. This configuration can accommodate a wide range of applications, from ultra-precise blood-sugar monitoring to infectious-agent detection.

The editors of Glamour have discovered the personal IS political and the Bushies are lying about women’s health. Sneak a look at the May cover of Glamour magazine if you want to learn about “12 Sexual Experiences Every Man and Woman Should Have,” “16 Rapid Beauty Fixes” or how to have “A Sexy Body at Any Size!” The young college-educated women the magazine caters to also can learn “Why Doctors Can’t Give You the Care You Deserve.”

Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) in the School of Computer Science’s Robotics Institute is unveiling a unique unmanned ground vehicle that offers new strength, mobility and autonomy features for the Army’s effort to keep its troops out of harm’s way. The 6.5-ton “Crusher” combines the strength and mobility of a predecessor known as Spinner with NREC-developed autonomy capabilities to create an extremely robust, unmanned vehicle that can function on its own in challenging off-road terrain.

There will be no tsunamis, firestorms or mass extinctions to spoil your Memorial Day weekend. Although the Internet is rife with speculation that a fragment of Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 will strike the Earth on May 25, neither the main comet nor any of its more than 40 fragments pose a danger to Earth.

With hormonal male contraception likely to be available in the near future, results of a study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET highlight how such contraception is reversible within a few months. Currently available male contraceptive methods (condoms, withdrawal, and vasectomy) are not acceptable to many couples because they are either not sufficiently reliable or not easily reversible. In a similar way to ovulation suppression by hormone treatment in women, sperm production can be fully inhibited by androgen or androgen-progestagen treatment combinations in men.

With an estimated 12 billion websites online, it’s not always easy finding the exact site you want. However, University of Alberta computer scientists have developed software they believe will make surfing the Web faster and easier.

Psychiatric researchers at The Zucker Hillside Hospital campus of The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research have uncovered evidence of a gene that appears to influence intelligence. Working in conjunction with researchers at Harvard Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics in Boston, the Zucker Hillside team examined the genetic blueprints of individuals with schizophrenia, a neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by cognitive impairment, and compared them with healthy volunteers. They discovered that the dysbindin-1 gene (DTNBP1), which they previously demonstrated to be associated with schizophrenia, may also be linked to general cognitive ability. The study is published in the May 15 print issue of Human Molecular Genetics, available online today, April 27.

Personalized health messages are better, even if a computer writes them.

MIT brain researchers have developed a “cocktail” of dietary supplements, now in human clinical trials, that holds promise for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. The MIT research suggests that a cocktail treatment of omega-3 fatty acids and two other compounds normally present in the blood, could delay the cognitive decline seen in Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicts an estimated 4 million to 5 million Americans.

A pair of dancing galaxies appears dressed for a cosmic masquerade in a new image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The infrared picture shows what looks like two icy blue eyes staring through an elaborate, swirling red mask. These “eyes” are actually the cores of two merging galaxies, called NGC 2207 and IC 2163, which recently met and began to twirl around each other.

Researchers at the University of Manchester are testing a secret herb in a bid to stop the severe hot flushes that besiege breast cancer patients on hormone treatment. Professor Alex Molassiotis, of the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, says the herb – one of the mint family, found in any kitchen – is thought to stop the hot flushes and night sweats which can be so bad that some women have to change their clothes three or four times a night.

Since the beginning of industrialisation the amount of precipitation in Pakistan has increased considerably. This is shown by what is the first evaluation worldwide of isotopes in the annual rings of juniper trees which are more than 1,000 years old.

Scientists have discovered that a dominant hyena puts her cubs on the road to success before they are born by passing on high levels of certain hormones that make her budding young leaders more aggressive and sexually advanced. The report, published in the April 27 issue of Nature, is the first study in mammals to demonstrate a relationship between a female’s social rank and her ability to influence her offspring’s behavior through prenatal hormone transfer. Previously, this phenomenon had only been documented in birds.

Research reported in the journal, Science, provides contrary evidence to the argument from ‘irreducible complexity’ invoked by IDers.

Excessive moisture can typically wreak havoc on electronic devices, but now researchers have demonstrated that a little water can help create ultra-dense storage systems for computers and electronics. A team of experimentalists and theorists at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University and Harvard University has proposed a new and surprisingly effective means of stabilizing and controlling ferroelectricity in nanostructures: terminating their surfaces with fragments of water.

Paleontologists at the Duke Lemur Center have assembled a new picture of a 35-million-year-old fossil mammal — and they even have added a hint of sound. By painstakingly measuring hundreds of specimens of a fossil mammal called Thyrohyrax, recovered from the famous fossil beds of Egypt’s Fayum Province, the researchers determined that males of this now-extinct species — and only males — had oversized, swollen lower jaws shaped much like a banana. Further, the team speculated, the animals may have used the balloonlike structural chamber that shaped their bizarre jaws to produce sound.