19 March 2000 -
MIT
Ocean Engineering Testing Tank Biomimetics Project:
RoboTuna - Consider the fish: highly
maneuverable and an effortless swimmer, this animal 160
million years in the making is superbly adapted to its
watery environs. Now, in work that could lead to mini
submarines with similar attributes, MIT engineers have
developed the first robotic version of Nature's piscine
wonder...
Mammograms May
Not Matter - Mammography, one of the most widely
used screening tests for breast cancer, is next to
useless in reducing the death rate from the disease,
Danish researchers said on Friday. "There
is no reliable evidence that screening decreases breast
cancer mortality," Peter Gotzsche and Ole Olsen of
the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen said in the
latest issue of The Lancet medical journal. Mammography uses a series of X-rays to
detect abnormalities, such as tumors, in the breasts...
SERVICE
UPDATE FOR OFFICE 2000 RELEASED - Microsoft
hopes history won't repeat itself. The software
giant posted Service Release 1 (SR-1) for Office
2000 yesterday. It's the first set of patches and
fixes for Office 2000 since the product shipped in
June. You may remember that Microsoft had to recall
and patch both service releases it delivered for
Office 97...
Hubble
Sees Possible Extrasolar Planet - Astronomers using the Hubble Space
Telescope have found what may be an extrasolar planet
-- the first seen directly -- that has been ejected
from its parent stars. The
object, named TMR-1C, was seen in an infrared image of
a star-forming region in the constellation Taurus some
450 light-years from the Earth. The image shows the
object with a tendril of light stretching back to a
binary star system 210 billion km (130 million mi.)
away...
Weather out of this
world - Astronomers have found the first
hints that failed stars known as ‘brown dwarfs’
may have weather patterns with winds, clouds and
storms. This was announced today by Dr Chris Tinney
at ScienceNOW! in Melbourne...
Seeing
X-Rays in a Whole New Light, Digital machines speed up
the process, offer better images - With
a couple of mouse clicks, Dr. Charles Anderson called
up a digital X-ray image on a large computer screen.
Not only was he able to zoom in on a section of a
patient's knee, he was able to look into the future of
radiology. Anderson
was demonstrating a new type of X-ray machine at the
Veteran's Administration Medical Center in San
Francisco. The machine uses new digital technology to
capture X-ray images instead of the century-old
technique using standard analog technology...
Polar
Substorm - March 2, 2000 -- Last week an interplanetary wind
storm hit our planet. For over two days, a gale of
energetic particles from the Sun blew past the Earth
at speeds exceeding 500 times that of a speeding
bullet. The source of all this activity was a large
coronal hole stretched across the face of the Sun. The
hole has since departed and the powerful
interplanetary breeze of magnetized gas has subsided...
Six
billion miles and counting.... - Last month NASA
received a weak signal from Pioneer 10, twice as far from
the Sun as Pluto and speeding toward the constellation
Taurus. With its red eye glittering in the southeastern sky
just after sunset, Taurus the Bull is one of the most
arresting winter constellations. Most stargazers know it
well, but what many don't know is that the familiar
constellation is also a very far out tourist destination. In
about 30,000 years Taurus will receive a remarkable visitor
from Earth -- a well-traveled spacecraft named Pioneer 10...
Sweeping
up Stardust - Our solar system is moving through a
cloud of gas and dust from between the stars. NASA's
STARDUST probe began collecting samples of the cloud last
week. February 28, 2000 -- Most science fiction movies
portray space as cold, black and empty. In fact, the voids
between the stars are anything but vacuous. Interstellar
space is permeated by clouds of gas and dust. These dusty
clouds are places where stars are born and where complicated
chemical reactions form organic molecules, including amino
acids...
Net
use survey slammed as 'non-science' - A new study
that finds increased Internet use causes decreased
face-to-face social interaction is being roundly criticized
by detractors as non-science. "Presenting it as a
scientific study is a bit of a reach. It's preliminary work
and it doesn't tell us much,'' said Howard Fienberg, a
research analyst with the Statistical Assessment Service in
Washington, D.C...
Waiting
for Cygnus X-3 - One of the brightest
x-ray sources in the Milky Way seems about to
erupt in a dazzling flare. By studying the
explosion scientists hope to unravel an
extragalactic mystery. Astronomers are
increasingly convinced that supermassive black
holes lie at the centers of most large
galaxies. It's a classic case of truth being
stranger than fiction. Gigantic disks of gas
-- called accretion disks -- swirl around
central black holes that weigh in at millions
or even billions of solar masses. As gas in
the accretion disk falls into the hole it
heats up and glows so brightly in x-rays that
we can detect them a billion light years away.
The cores of these systems, called active
galactic nuclei (AGNs), outshine all of the
stars in the host galaxy by factors of 10 to
1000...
Scientists
Find Origin of AIDS - "Researchers using one
of the most powerful computers in the world said they had
traced the origin of the AIDS virus, dating it to around
1930. Bette Korber and colleagues at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory in New Mexico used a computer model to calculate
the mutations found in the human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV) and estimate when it would have jumped from
chimpanzees to humans..."
Old
computers lose history record - "Computer files:
which is the dinosaur? Vital archaeological records could be
lost as the computers they are stored on become obsolete.
The physical site is nearly always completely destroyed
during a dig, but archaeologists claim the knowledge they
glean from the ground is then available for posterity.
Studies in York have revealed that in fact data stored on
computers could disappear in little more than a decade.
"The irony is that archaeological information held in
magnetic format is decaying faster than it ever did in the
ground," warns William Kilbride of the Archaeology Data
Service (ADS) at the University of York..."
