Major changes needed for coral reef survival

Public release date: 28-Jun-2013
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Contact: Ken Caldeira
kcaldeira@carnegiescience.edu
650-704-7212
Carnegie Institution

Washington, D.C.To prevent coral reefs around the world from dying off, deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions are required, says a new study from Carnegie's Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira. They find that all existing coral reefs will be engulfed in inhospitable ocean chemistry conditions by the end of the century if civilization continues along its current emissions trajectory. Their work will be published July 3 by Environmental Research Letters.

Coral reefs are havens for marine biodiversity and underpin the economies of many coastal communities. But they are very sensitive to changes in ocean chemistry resulting from greenhouse gas emissions, as well as to coastal pollution, warming waters, overdevelopment, and overfishing.

Ricke and Caldeira, along with colleagues from Institut Pierre Simon Laplace and Stanford University, focused on the acidification of open ocean water surrounding coral reefs and how it affects a reef's ability to survive.

Coral reefs use a mineral called aragonite to make their skeletons. It is a naturally occurring form of calcium carbonate, CaCO3. When carbon dioxide, CO2, from the atmosphere is absorbed by the ocean, it forms carbonic acid (the same thing that makes soda fizz), making the ocean more acidic and decreasing the ocean's pH. This increase in acidity makes it more difficult for many marine organisms to grow their shells and skeletons, and threatens coral reefs the world over.

Using results from simulations conducted using an ensemble of sophisticated models, Ricke, Caldeira, and their co-authors calculated ocean chemical conditions that would occur under different future scenarios and determined whether these chemical conditions could sustain coral reef growth.

Ricke said: "Our results show that if we continue on our current emissions path, by the end of the century there will be no water left in the ocean with the chemical properties that have supported coral reef growth in the past. We can't say with 100% certainty that all shallow-water coral reefs will die, but it is a pretty good bet."

Deep cuts in emissions are necessary in order to save even a fraction of existing reefs, according to the team's results. Chemical conditions that can support coral reef growth can be sustained only with very aggressive cuts in carbon dioxide emissions.

"To save coral reefs, we need to transform our energy system into one that does not use the atmosphere and oceans as waste dumps for carbon dioxide pollution. The decisions we make in the next years and decades are likely to determine whether or not coral reefs survive the rest of this century," Caldeira said.

###

The World Climate Research Programme's Coupled Model Intercomparison Project is provided support from the U.S. Department of Energy, which developed a software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals.

The Carnegie Institution for Science is a private, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with six research departments throughout the U.S. Since its founding in 1902, the Carnegie Institution has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Public release date: 28-Jun-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Ken Caldeira
kcaldeira@carnegiescience.edu
650-704-7212
Carnegie Institution

Washington, D.C.To prevent coral reefs around the world from dying off, deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions are required, says a new study from Carnegie's Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira. They find that all existing coral reefs will be engulfed in inhospitable ocean chemistry conditions by the end of the century if civilization continues along its current emissions trajectory. Their work will be published July 3 by Environmental Research Letters.

Coral reefs are havens for marine biodiversity and underpin the economies of many coastal communities. But they are very sensitive to changes in ocean chemistry resulting from greenhouse gas emissions, as well as to coastal pollution, warming waters, overdevelopment, and overfishing.

Ricke and Caldeira, along with colleagues from Institut Pierre Simon Laplace and Stanford University, focused on the acidification of open ocean water surrounding coral reefs and how it affects a reef's ability to survive.

Coral reefs use a mineral called aragonite to make their skeletons. It is a naturally occurring form of calcium carbonate, CaCO3. When carbon dioxide, CO2, from the atmosphere is absorbed by the ocean, it forms carbonic acid (the same thing that makes soda fizz), making the ocean more acidic and decreasing the ocean's pH. This increase in acidity makes it more difficult for many marine organisms to grow their shells and skeletons, and threatens coral reefs the world over.

Using results from simulations conducted using an ensemble of sophisticated models, Ricke, Caldeira, and their co-authors calculated ocean chemical conditions that would occur under different future scenarios and determined whether these chemical conditions could sustain coral reef growth.

Ricke said: "Our results show that if we continue on our current emissions path, by the end of the century there will be no water left in the ocean with the chemical properties that have supported coral reef growth in the past. We can't say with 100% certainty that all shallow-water coral reefs will die, but it is a pretty good bet."

Deep cuts in emissions are necessary in order to save even a fraction of existing reefs, according to the team's results. Chemical conditions that can support coral reef growth can be sustained only with very aggressive cuts in carbon dioxide emissions.

"To save coral reefs, we need to transform our energy system into one that does not use the atmosphere and oceans as waste dumps for carbon dioxide pollution. The decisions we make in the next years and decades are likely to determine whether or not coral reefs survive the rest of this century," Caldeira said.

###

The World Climate Research Programme's Coupled Model Intercomparison Project is provided support from the U.S. Department of Energy, which developed a software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals.

The Carnegie Institution for Science is a private, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with six research departments throughout the U.S. Since its founding in 1902, the Carnegie Institution has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.

---

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-06/ci-acn062813.php

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Molecule drives aggressive breast cancer

June 27, 2013 ? Recent studies by researchers at Thomas Jefferson University's Kimmel Cancer Center have shown a gene known to coordinate initial development of the eye (EYA1) is a powerful breast tumor promoter in mice. The gene EYA1 was also shown to be overexpressed in a genetic breast cancer subtype called luminal B.

The scientists found that excess activity of this gene -- EYA1 -- also enhances development of breast cancer stem cells that promote resistance to cancer therapy, recurrence, and poor survival.

Because EYA1 is an enzyme, the scientists are now working to identify a natural compound that could shut down EYA1 activity, says Richard Pestell, M.D., Ph.D., Director of Kimmel Cancer Center.

"It was known that EYA1 is over-expressed in some breast cancers, but no one knew what that meant," he says. "Our studies have shown the enzyme drives luminal B breast tumor growth in animals and the enzyme activity is required for tumor growth."

In a mouse model of aggressive breast cancer, the research team targeted a single amino acid on the EYA1 phosphatase activity. They found that inactivating the phosphatase activity of EYA1 stopped aggressive human tumors from growing.

"We are excited about the potential of drug treatment, because it is much easier to develop a drug that targets a phosphatase enzyme like EYA1, than it is to target a gene directly," he says.

Tracing how EYA1 leads to poor outcomes

The study, which was published in the May 1 issue of Cancer Research, examined 2,154 breast cancer samples for the presence of EYA1. The researchers then linked those findings to patient outcomes. They found a direct relationship between increased level of EYA1 and cyclin D1 to poor survival.

They then chose one form of breast cancer -- luminal B -- and traced the bimolecular pathway of how EYA1 with cyclin D1 increases cancer aggressiveness. Luminal B breast cancer, one of five different breast cancer subtypes, is a hormone receptor-positive form that accounts for about 20 percent of human breast cancer. It is more aggressive than luminal A tumors, a hormone receptor-positive cancer that is the most common form of breast cancer.

Their work delineated a string of genes and proteins that are affected by EYA1, and they also discovered that EYA1 pushes an increase in formation of mammospheres, which are a measure of breast cancer stem cells.

"Within every breast cancer are breast cancer stem cells, which give rise to anti-cancer therapy resistance, recurrence and metastases," Dr. Pestell says. "We demonstrated in laboratory experiments that EYA1 expression increase the number of mammospheres and other markers of breast cancer stem cells."

"As the EYA1 phosphatase activity drove breast cancer stem cell expansion, this activity may contribute to worse survival," he says.

This study was supported in part by the NIH grants RO1CA132115, R01CA70896, R01CA75503, R01CA86072 and P30CA56036 (RGP), a grant from the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (RGP), a grant for Dr. Ralph and Marian C. Falk Medical Research Trust (RGP), Margaret Q. Landenberger Research Foundation, the Department of Defense Concept Award W81XWH-11-1-0303.

Study co-authors are, from Kimmel Cancer Center: first author Kongming Wu, Zhaoming Li, Shaoxin Cai, Lifeng Tian, Ke Chen, Jing Wang and Adam Ertel; Junbo Hu, from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China; and Ye Sun, and Xue Li from Boston Children's Hospital.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/jBYVoKY_n-o/130627190327.htm

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This New Contact Lens Basically Turns Your Eye Into a Telescope

Contact lenses are great if your only issue is near or farsightedness, but for those struggling with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of blindness among older adults, those flimsy little lenses ain't going to cut it?or at least not the kind of contact lenses you're used to. But soon, AMD-sufferers could see their vision vastly improving thanks to a slim, adjustable telescope that sits right in the middle of their eye.

Funded by DARPA, the joint team of researchers from the US and Switzerland were facing the problem of correcting vision loss as a result of retina damage?something that normal contacts, which simply refocus the eyes, do virtually nothing to help. By magnifying an AMD patient's vision, though, light is also magnified, allowing it to spread out and hit the parts of the retina that remain intact. Until now, though, any sort of optical magnifier came in the form of a highly intrusive, spectacle-mounted telescope or micro-telescopes that required invasive eye surgery.

The team, led by University of California San Diego Professor Joseph Ford, employed tightly-fitted mirrors in designing a telescope that stands at just over one millimeter thick. While the unobtrusiveness of the new telescope design is impressive in and of itself, the team also managed to create a system that allows for the patient's vision to easily switch from magnified to normal. Thanks to a set of liquid crystal glasses, users can choose to block either the magnifying portion of the contact lens along the rim or the unmagnified portion in the center. According to the news release:

The liquid crystals in the glasses electrically change the orientation of polarized light, allowing light with one orientation or the other to pass through the glasses to the contact lens.

The contacts themselves are made out of a material called polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), an incredibly strong component that allows for the small grooves necessary to fix the abnormal color that the lens's shape creates. And while these new lenses are an incredible advancement, it wil still be some time before we start seeing them on a consumer level. The same grooves that fix color also have the effect of reducing the quality of the actual image, and PMMA isn't gas permeable, which would mean that patients wouldn't be able to wear the lenses for any extended period of time.

Still, an actual, functional telescope shaved down to practically nothing is a huge step for improving the quality of life of those suffering from AMD. And once researchers manage to work out the kinks, the world is going to start looking a whole lot brighter. [Business Wire]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/this-new-contact-lens-basically-turns-your-eye-into-a-t-598794815

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Beyonce's father sues Rupert Murdoch's Sun for defamation

By Tim Kenneally

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Matthew Knowles, father and former manager of music superstar Beyonce Knowles, has filed suit against the Sun, claiming that Rupert Murdoch's British tabloid made "malicious and false statements" in an article about him.

The suit claims that Knowles consented to an interview with reporter Georgina Dickinson on the condition that he would not "discuss personal family topics, only his career and the career of his artists, and music or business topics." Dickinson promised that her article would "paint a well-rounded picture of Mr. Knowles, both as a loving family man and force to be reckoned with in the music world."

However, according to the suit, the story published in the Sun contains multiple falsehoods, including the claim that Knowles had suffered a "bitter rift with his famous daughter - admitting he is devastated at being pushed out of her life."

Knowles' suit states that the article also claims that he "has reportedly not yet met Blue Ivy," despite photographic evidence to the contrary.

TheWrap has reached out to Murdoch's News Corporation for comment.

Knowles' suit claims that, when he confronted Dickinson about the assertions in the article, she could "only apologize that someone in London, not me" changed the story, and sent him the story as she submitted to the paper.

The difference between the filed story and the published story, the suit claims, "is stark."

On top of it all, the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Texas on Tuesday, claims that Knowles was promised payment for the interview in exchange for pass on future interviews with U.K. publishers, but "the promised payment, however, was never made."

Alleging defamation and breach of contract, Knowles is seeking unspecified damages.

(Pamela Chelin contributed to this report)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/beyonces-father-sues-rupert-murdochs-sun-defamation-003332619.html

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Stevens' father: Carry on his good work (CNN)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, RSS and RSS Feed via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/315594761?client_source=feed&format=rss

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Content Recommendation Startup My6sense Raises $2M After Shifting Focus To Mobile Publisher Tools

Personalized content startup My6sense announced today that it has raised $2 million in new funding. It's also using the announcement to talk about its new focus ? the company's Content Discovery Bar for publishers. In the past, my6sense used its technology to build content recommendation apps for consumers. Co-founder and CEO Avinoam Rubinstein told me that there was some promising early adoption, but "we actually faced a significant issue of generating revenue on a consumer application." So the team decided to build a tool for publishers instead.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/KTlTthbnoxE/

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Dems unhappy IRS screened for progressives too

FILE - In this June 6, 2013 file photo, acting IRS commissioner Danny Werfel testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington. Werfel unveils his plan to fix an agency besieged by scandal. President Barack Obama ordered Werfel to conduct a 30-day review of the IRS when he appointed him last month. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

FILE - In this June 6, 2013 file photo, acting IRS commissioner Danny Werfel testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington. Werfel unveils his plan to fix an agency besieged by scandal. President Barack Obama ordered Werfel to conduct a 30-day review of the IRS when he appointed him last month. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Democrats are unhappy that newly revealed Internal Revenue Service documents show the agency screened for progressive groups seeking tax-exempt status, not just the tea party organizations for which the IRS was already under fire.

Democrats also want to know why the Treasury Department inspector general who investigated IRS targeting of conservative groups didn't mention that terms like "Progressives" and "Healthcare legislation" were on the same lists agency workers used to find applications to review closely.

"The Inspector General seriously erred in not making clear in both the audit report and his testimony on this matter that 'Tea Party' and 'Progressives' were included" in the lists IRS workers used to screen applications, Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., wrote Monday in a memo his aides distributed. Levin is the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee.

That Treasury investigator, J. Russell George, released a report in May detailing "inappropriate criteria" the IRS used to single out conservative groups for intensified treatment, and has testified to congressional committees several times. He never affirmed that progressive groups were sought out as well, although he cautioned lawmakers that he recently had found lists that raised concerns about other "political factors" he did not specify.

Levin's complaint came hours after Danny Werfel, the new IRS chief, told reporters that his agency's screening of groups seeking tax-exempt status was broader and lasted longer than has been previously disclosed.

In a conference call with reporters, Werfel said that after becoming acting IRS chief last month, he discovered "inappropriate criteria that was in use" and ordered the practice halted immediately. Previously, investigators have said agency officials ended the targeting of conservative groups in May 2012 ? not revealing that screening for other political viewpoints had continued.

Werfel did not specify what terms were on the lists. But later Monday, Levin's Democratic staff released 15 lists that IRS screeners used to find groups that merited close attention, and lists from April 2013 included the terms "Paying National Debt" and "Green Energy Organizations."

Those lists, which changed over time and were dated between August 2010 and April 2013, also included the terms "Progressive" and "Tea Party" as well as "Medical Marijuana," ''Occupied Territory Advocacy," ''Healthcare legislation," ''Newspaper Entities" and "Paying National Debt." The lists ranged from 11 pages to 17 pages and were heavily blacked out to protect sensitive taxpayer information.

Neither the 15 IRS lists released by Democrats nor a separate IRS document obtained by The Associated Press addressed how many progressive groups received close scrutiny or how the agency treated their requests. Dozens of conservative groups saw their applications experience lengthy delays, and they received unusually intrusive questions about their donors and other details that agency officials have conceded were inappropriate.

A statement by the GOP staff of House Ways and Means said, "It is one thing to flag a group, it is quite another to repeatedly target and abuse conservative groups."

The term "Tea Party" appeared on the earliest IRS lists, though by 2012 it was replaced by more generic descriptions of political activity. IRS regulations allow it to grant tax-exempt status to groups mostly engaged in "social welfare," but not if participation in political election campaigns becomes their "primary" activity ? guidelines that agency officials concede can be vague and confusing.

Werfel ordered a halt in the use of spreadsheets listing the terms ? called BOLO lists for "be on the lookout for" ? on June 12 and formalized their suspension with a June 20 written order, according to the IRS document obtained by the AP.

That document also referred to terms including "Israel" and "Occupy" as being on the lists. Those terms did not appear on the lists released by Ways and Means Democrats.

The document obtained by the AP blamed the continued use of inappropriate criteria by screeners on "a lapse in judgment" by the agency's former top officials.

In a letter to George he wrote Monday, Levin asked him to describe why his May report omitted mentioning that "Progressives" appeared on the IRS lists.

On Monday, Karen Kraushaar, a spokeswoman for the inspector general, said their May audit focused on terms the IRS used to pick cases to be studied for political campaign activity, which might disqualify a group from tax-exempt status. Other terms were listed for other reasons, such as helping screeners find possible cases of fraud, she said.

Kraushaar said the inspector general was reviewing whether other criteria used by IRS officials led to expanded scrutiny for some groups "and why these criteria were implemented."

Werfel's remarks came as he released an 83-page examination he has conducted of his embattled agency. The conclusions, which Werfel cautioned were preliminary, so far have found there was "insufficient action" by IRS managers to prevent and disclose the problems but no specific cases of misconduct.

"We have not found evidence of intentional wrongdoing by anyone in the IRS or involvement in these matters by anyone outside the IRS," he told reporters.

Werfel's report describes new procedures aimed at preventing unfair treatment of taxpayers. They include a fast-track process for some groups seeking tax-exempt status and a new board that will recommend any additional personnel moves "to hold accountable those responsible" for the targeting of conservative groups.

The top five people in the agency responsible for the tax-exempt status of organizations have already been removed, including the former acting commissioner, Steven Miller, whom President Barack Obama replaced with Werfel.

Werfel's comments and report drew negative reviews from one of the IRS' chief critics in Congress, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

"As investigations by Congress and the Justice Department are still ongoing, Mr. Werfel's assertion that he has found no evidence that anyone at IRS intentionally did anything wrong can only be called premature," Issa said.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., whose panel is also investigating the agency, said the IRS "still needs to provide clear answers to the most significant questions ? who started this practice, why was it allowed to continue for so long, and how widespread was it?"

Werfel, initially named the IRS' acting commissioner, is now the agency's deputy principal commissioner because federal law limits the time an agency can be led by an acting official.

___

Associated Press writers Stephen Ohlemacher and Henry C. Jackson contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2013-06-25-IRS-Political%20Groups/id-9b12644614ce4740b234b26b71ca2add

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Home improvement grants: The Great Choice of Flooring Products ...

If you really feel that you need to improve the appearance of your house with the best choice of flooring, it is always good for you to get to know about the Brewer Carpet One. This is actually about the best source in Stillwater to find out the latest products on flooring and also the high quality of carpets, the hardwood, and vinyl, also laminate flooring with the top quality. That?s why you really have to recognize about the most interesting offering with the help of professional staffs to improve the interior and exterior designs of your home or the commercial buildings with the high quality of flooring products.

So, you need to contact the Brewer Carpet One on Stillwater, Oklahoma to transform your house with the most terrific products of flooring and carpeting. You will always know that this is such a great product, with the most amazing shopping experience. Even, you will be guided with Tom Brewer since he is the owner for the amazing store of Brewer Carpet One. This is about the how the seller always knows all of the flooring and carpeting needs in every house, even you will always need the most affordable flooring products which can be installed directly for your house.

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Source: http://lifewasbeautifulk.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-great-choice-of-flooring-products.html

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Jay-Z And Justin Timberlake's 'Holy Grail' Lyrics Revealed

Hov tackles the pitfalls of fame on the track, which is expected to be released on Tuesday.
By Rob Markman

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1709482/jay-z-justin-timberlake-magna-carta-holy-grail-lyrics.jhtml

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10 Sciencey Stats on the Man of Steel

Credit: Warner Bros. Online Press Kit

A new iteration of Superman?the Man of Steel?zooms into theaters today looking to reboot the series for the latest generation (with Kryptonian latex, apparently). Superman is neither human nor bound by the laws of science, but there are still some fascinating facts to read up on before accepting this born-again hero.

1. Superman is basically a solar panel with red and blue tights.

Superman is able to man-handle puny Earthlings and smash through buildings for two reasons. First, his home planet of Krypton had much more mass than Earth, making the surface gravity of the planet much higher. His muscles are overqualified for 1G. Living on Earth after growing up under the stress of intense gravity would be like you moving to the Moon (you?d finally be able to dunk).

The other reason Superman is so, well, super, is that his cells basically photosynthesize. He doesn?t use the yellow Sun of the Earth precisely like a plant, but more like a photovoltaic cell. In such a cell, the Sun?s rays hit semiconductors made of some material like silicon and their interaction releases electrons. These flowing electrons create electricity. It?s not exactly spelled out how Superman?s cells use the Sun?s energy, but his costume kind of looks like a solar panel, so we?ll go with that.

2. Superman doesn?t understand how time works.

Famously, at the end of Superman II, Superman (fantastically played by Christopher Reeve) is so distraught by the death of Lois Lane that he tries to turn back time. He does this by flying around the Earth at unimaginable speed. It?s a valiant effort that works in the movie, but has no basis in physics.

If you wanted to travel backwards in time, you?re out of luck. We have theories on how it might be possible to do so, but they all involve wormholes and black holes and other stuff that would probably kill you. If you want to travel forward in time, you just have to go really fast. If you go fast enough, according to Einstein, time will slow down for you. The faster you go, the slower you age. So if you did a Kessel run like Han Solo?a trip over many light-years in a few hours?you would only experience a few hours while the rest of the galaxy ages 40 years.

By flying really, really fast around the Earth, Superman will actually speed into the future, not the past. In fact, by the time he is done, he might return to find everyone he knew dead of old age.

3. Superman is a time traveler.

Before it blew up, Superman was sent to Earth from the planet Krypton?50 light years away. A little Kryptonian baby hurtling through space, Kal-El reached Earth in 1-3 years (the nerds disagree on the time). To travel such a long distance?300 trillion miles?in such a short time, the baby would have to warp the space-time continuum with his speed. Actually, such a speed, 25 times the speed of light, is physically impossible. But if the baby traveled for two years at nearly the speed of light?the universal speed limit?any remaining Kryptonians would be two years older while he only aged three months. Forward time travelers don?t get to make a lot of long-term friends.

4. Superman?s weakness was inspired by a real element.

Kryptonite, that glowing green rock from the core of Krypton, is one of Superman?s few Achilles? heels. Time and again it is a plot device to make the hero human. In 1898, two British researchers discovered the element that would become the inspiration for this material.

William Ramsay and Morris Travers were looking for elements in the helium family when they stumbled upon krypton, a gas that doesn?t want to play with any other element. It?s too noble for that. The team later discovered other noble gases, and Ramsay won the 1904 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

When Superman was created in 1938, the authors Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster named the hero?s home planet after the previously discovered gas. (While an oxyanion of krypton could give scientists a reason to actually call something ?kryptonite,? the gas is simply non-reactive with most other elements.)

5. It?s radiation that makes Superman weak.

The prevailing theory in geekdom is that kryptonite can kill Superman because it disrupts his solar panel-like energy absorption. Without energy from the Sun, he weakens and eventually dies. Though kryptonite is a fictional mineral, the way it interferes makes sense. Radioactive materials emit radiation in the form of particles and energy. This can be anything from whole helium nuclei to gamma rays. If gamma rays were emitted by kryptonite, they would ionize Superman?s cells. By knocking electrons and atoms around in his body, this process of ionization would wreak havoc and disrupt normal cell sun-gathering. Radiation sickness can be lethal, and it?s a form of it that reduces Superman to a defeated hero. (It?s also the reason why water bears should have saved the Enterprise instead of Captain Kirk.)

6. Superman didn?t destroy the Russian meteor earlier this year because it would have destroyed the city.

Quoting from an earlier piece that you can read right here on Scientific American:

Superman, who seemed to know a fair bit about reporting, used the International Space Station (ISS) to convince reporters during the conference that smashing the meteor with a super punch would be a terrible idea. ?This meteor entered the atmosphere with 170 times more kinetic energy than the ISS has while orbiting the Earth,? he exclaimed. Superman continued, ?thankfully, the atmosphere absorbed most of the meteor?s energy, with only the aftermath of the fireball doing damage to Chelyabinsk.?

The hero noted that only around 20% of the meteor?s energy went into shaking the city, still blowing out windows and crumbling buildings.

?If I released all of the meteor?s energy at once by destroying it, I would have made it much worse.?

You can read the rest of the totally not fake press conference that I had with Superman here.

7. Superman probably shaves with an angle grinder.

Everything about Superman is super, even his beard. Bill Nye has a theory on how Superman takes care of his tough-as-steel five o?clock shadow. (It?s product placement but it?s also good science. The Mythbusters have an answer too.)

8. Superman once gave Lex Luthor cognitive dissonance.

In the issue Superman #2 from 1987, Lex Luthor, Superman?s arch-nemesis, dumped resources into building a supercomputer able to deduce the hero?s identity. The machine worked like a dream and out the answer popped: ?Clark Kent is Superman.? Done and done. But Luthor refused to believe it. The evil genius couldn?t easily resolve the cognitive dissonance in his head.

In psychology, cognitive dissonance is an internal tension between two beliefs a person holds. When it arises, we seek to alleviate that tension by compartmentalizing the beliefs or coming up with an explanation to deal with it. Lex simultaneously held the belief that Superman was Clark Kent and that he was too smart not to realize that obvious answer. To get rid of the dissonance, Lex made a logical fallacy that we can call ?the argument from brilliance.? Lex believed himself too smart to miss an easy answer, therefore the answer had to be false. Superman?s true identity remains a secret, and Lex Luthor makes illogical arguments. The world is safe.

9. Batman would beat Superman.

First, because Batman. Second, because it happened. Third, Batman even faked his own death while doing it, because he?s Batman.

10. Nobody recognizes Superman because they all have face-blindness.

In a piece appearing in the science section of Slate today, I explain a neuropsychological answer to the age old question of why, simply by matching faces, no one realizes that Superman is Clark Kent. I have excerpted a section below:

The most powerful superhero of all time, Superman, has arguably the worst disguise of all time. A slight application of hair gel and some glasses turn the Man of Steel, the statuesque savior of humanity, into Clark Kent, a mild-mannered reporter at the Daily Planet. It?s a fa?ade that a toddler should be able to see through, but no one does. Why not?

This bizarre failure of perception can only be attributed to Superman?s greatest and perhaps most scientifically astute superpower: He is able to surround himself with friends and co-workers who all suffer from prosopagnosia?face blindness.

You can read the rest of why Superman works with a bunch of prosopagnosiacs here.

?

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=10-sciencey-stats-on-the-man-of-steel

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Lomography intros Konstruktor: craft your own film SLR for $35 (video)

It's easy to build your own camera if you're determined to capture images on the cheap; it's another matter if you want something just slightly more refined. If that's the case, Lomography has you covered with its new Konstruktor kit. The pack gives DIY types everything they need to build their own 35mm film SLR, including a removable 50mm f/10 lens and customizable panels. There's no control over aperture or shutter speed, but Lomography's retro-inclined crowd will like the quick toggle for long exposure shots. They'll also like the $35 price -- it's possible to buy 100 Konstructors before matching the cost of just one EOS 5D Mark III. Should that kind of math be too much to resist, you'll be glad to hear that the camera is already on sale at Lomography's shop.

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Source: Lomography

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/lljly11VwkU/

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Def Leppard guitarist being treated for cancer

Music

Erin Coulehan Rolling Stone

14 hours ago

David Becker / Getty Images for Def Leppard

Vivian Campbell.

Def Leppard 's Vivian Campbell says he's being treated for Hodgkin's lymphoma. The guitarist has been receiving chemotherapy for two months, with four months of treatment remaining, The Associated Press reports.

100 Best Albums of the Eighties: Def Leppard, "Pyromania"

"I feel fortunate that my cancer sent me an alarm call in the form of 'the cough that wouldn't quit,'" Campbell said in a statement. The guitarist joined Def Leppard in 1992, after stints playing in Dio and Whitesnake. Hodgkin's lymphomia is a cancer of the white blood cells.

Def Leppard strip down for acoustic versions of "Hysteria" and "Pour Some Sugar on Me"

Despite the diagnosis, Campbell says he plans to hit the road with Def Leppard this summer for a tour that starts June 21st at the Hellfest Music Festival in France and ends July 17th in Canandaigua, New York.

Source: http://www.today.com/entertainment/def-leppard-guitarist-vivian-campbell-being-treated-cancer-6C10262991

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Spain police dog wins British award for bravery

Police dog Ajax looks on as by his handler, Civil Guard Sergeant Juan Carlos Alabarces Munoz, 3rd left embraces a colleague after the dog won a medal in Mostoles, just outside of Madrid, Spain Tuesday June 11, 2013. The Spanish police dog has received an award by a British animal defense group in recognition of his bravery on detecting a bomb on the Spanish island of Mallorca allowing police to explode it. Ajax,?a bushy-coated gold and black 12-year-old German Shepherd? was presented with the award Tuesday at a ceremony on the outskirts of the Spanish capital by representatives of the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals.(AP Photo/Paul White)

Police dog Ajax looks on as by his handler, Civil Guard Sergeant Juan Carlos Alabarces Munoz, 3rd left embraces a colleague after the dog won a medal in Mostoles, just outside of Madrid, Spain Tuesday June 11, 2013. The Spanish police dog has received an award by a British animal defense group in recognition of his bravery on detecting a bomb on the Spanish island of Mallorca allowing police to explode it. Ajax,?a bushy-coated gold and black 12-year-old German Shepherd? was presented with the award Tuesday at a ceremony on the outskirts of the Spanish capital by representatives of the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals.(AP Photo/Paul White)

Police dog Ajax, right sits as by his handler, Civil Guard Sergeant Juan Carlos Alabarces Munoz makes a speech after the dog won a medal in Mostoles, just outside of Madrid, Spain Tuesday June 11, 2013. The Spanish police dog has received an award by a British animal defense group in recognition of his bravery on detecting a bomb on the Spanish island of Mallorca allowing police to explode it. Ajax,?a bushy-coated gold and black 12-year-old German Shepherd? was presented with the award Tuesday at a ceremony on the outskirts of the Spanish capital by representatives of the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals.(AP Photo/Paul White)

Police dog Ajax is applauded by Civil Guards and officials as he walks with by his handler, Sergeant Juan Carlos Alabarces Munoz, right to collect a medal in Mostoles, just outside of Madrid, Spain Tuesday June 11, 2013. The Spanish police dog has received an award by a British animal defense group in recognition of his bravery on detecting a bomb on the Spanish island of Mallorca allowing police to explode it. Ajax,?a bushy-coated gold and black 12-year-old German Shepherd? was presented with the award Tuesday at a ceremony on the outskirts of the Spanish capital by representatives of the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals. (AP Photo/Paul White)

MOSTOLES, Spain (AP) ? Ajax has a nose for trouble.

The retired Spanish police dog has received a prestigious award by a British animal charity group in recognition of his bravery and skill.

The bushy-coated, black-and-gold German Shepherd detected a bomb on the Spanish island of Mallorca only hours after two officers were killed in a terror attack on July 30, 2009.

The 12-year-old dog found the bomb planted under a car by the armed Basque group ETA in the town of Palma Nova.

He was decorated with the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals' Gold Medal at a ceremony Tuesday on the outskirts of Madrid.

Ajax is the 22nd dog to receive the award.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/aa9398e6757a46fa93ed5dea7bd3729e/Article_2013-06-11-Spain-Brave%20Dog/id-7634f587d7034a3cad1daf93c511c693

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B&G Foods to buy owner of Pirate's Booty brand

PARSIPPANY, N.J. (AP) ? Food maker B&G Foods Inc. is buying Robert's American Gourmet Food, which owns the Pirate's Booty brand, for $195 million in cash.

B&G Foods makes foods under brands such as Cream of Wheat, Mrs. Dash and Grandma's Molasses. CEO David Wenner says the acquisition helps it grow its natural snacks business.

Robert's American brands also include Smart Puffs and Original Tings and is owned by VMG Partners, Driven Capital Management, founder Robert Ehrlich and other owners.

The acquisition will be funded by a recent senior notes offering and revolving credit borrowings. It is expected to immediately benefit net income.

The deal is expected to close in July.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/b-g-foods-buy-owner-pirates-booty-brand-124444600.html

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Amount of dust blown across the Western U.S. is increasing

June 10, 2013 ? The amount of dust being blown across the landscape has increased over the last 17 years in large swaths of the West, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

The escalation in dust emissions -- which may be due to the interplay of several factors, including increased windstorm frequency, drought cycles and changing land-use patterns -- has implications both for the areas where the dust is first picked up by the winds and for the places where the dust is put back down.

"Dust storms cause a large-scale reorganization of nutrients on the surface of the Earth," said Janice Brahney, who led the study as a CU-Boulder doctoral student. "And we don't routinely monitor dust in most places, which means we don't have a good handle on how the material is moving, when it's moving and where it's going."

Based on anecdotal evidence, such as incidents of dust coating the snowpack in the southern Rockies and a seemingly greater number of dust storms noticed by Western residents, scientists have suspected that dust emissions were increasing. But because dust has not been routinely measured over long periods of time, it was difficult to say for sure.

"What we know is that there are a lot of dust storms, and if you ask people on the Western Slope of Colorado, or in Utah or Arizona, you'll often hear them say, 'Yeah, I grew up in this area, and I don't remember it ever being like this before,' " said CU-Boulder geological sciences Associate Professor Jason Neff, Brahney's adviser and a co-author of the paper. "So there is anecdotal evidence out there that things are changing, but no scientific data that can tell us whether or not that's true, at least for the recent past."

For the new study, recently published online in the journal Aeolian Research, the research team set out to determine if they could use calcium deposition as a proxy for dust measurements. Calcium can make its way into the atmosphere -- before falling back to earth along with precipitation -- through a number of avenues, including coal-fired power plants, forest fires, ocean spray and, key to this study, wind erosion of soils.

The amount of calcium dissolved in precipitation has long been measured by the National Atmospheric Deposition Program, or NADP, which first began recording the chemicals dissolved in precipitation in the late 1970s to better understand the phenomena of acid rain.

Brahney and her colleagues reviewed calcium deposition data from 175 NADP sites across the United States between 1994 and 2010, and they found that calcium deposition had increased at 116 of them. The sites with the greatest increases were clustered in the Northwest, the Midwest and the Intermountain West, with Colorado, Wyoming and Utah seeing especially large increases.

The scientists were able to determine that the increase was linked to dust erosion because none of the other possible sources of atmospheric calcium -- including industrial emissions, forest fires or ocean spray -- had increased during the 17-year period studied.

It's also likely that the calcium deposition record under-represents the amount of dust that's being blown around, said Brahney, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia in Canada. That's because the NADP network only measures dust that has collided with water in the atmosphere before precipitating to earth -- not dust that is simply moved by the wind. And not all dust contains the same amount of calcium.

The increase in dust erosion matters, the researchers said, because it can impoverish the soil in the areas where dust is being lost. Wind tends to pick up the finer particles in the soils, and those are the same particles that have the most nutrients and can hold onto the most soil moisture, Brahney said.

Increasing amounts of dust in the atmosphere also can cause people living in the rural West a variety of problems, including poor air quality and low visibility. In extreme cases, dust storms have shut down freeways, creating problems for travelers.

The areas where the dust travels to are also affected, though the impacts are more mixed. When dust is blown onto an existing snowpack, as is often the case in the Rockies, the dark particles better absorb the sun's energy and cause the snowpack to melt more quickly. But the dust that's blown in also brings nutrients to alpine areas, and the calcium in dust can buffer the effects of acid rain.

In the future, researchers working in Neff's lab hope to get a more precise picture of dust movement by measuring the dust itself. In the last five years, large vacuum-like measuring instruments designed specifically to suck in dust emissions have been installed at sites between the canyon lands of Utah and the Front Range of the Rockies. Once scientists have enough data collected, they'll be able to look for trends in dust emissions without relying on proxies.

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/FDrnP7r2-Y4/130610193033.htm

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When will my computer understand me?

June 10, 2013 ? It's not hard to tell the difference between the "charge" of a battery and criminal "charges." But for computers, distinguishing between the various meanings of a word is difficult.

For more than 50 years, linguists and computer scientists have tried to get computers to understand human language by programming semantics as software. Driven initially by efforts to translate Russian scientific texts during the Cold War (and more recently by the value of information retrieval and data analysis tools), these efforts have met with mixed success. IBM's Jeopardy-winning Watson system and Google Translate are high profile, successful applications of language technologies, but the humorous answers and mistranslations they sometimes produce are evidence of the continuing difficulty of the problem.

Our ability to easily distinguish between multiple word meanings is rooted in a lifetime of experience. Using the context in which a word is used, an intrinsic understanding of syntax and logic, and a sense of the speaker's intention, we intuit what another person is telling us.

"In the past, people have tried to hand-code all of this knowledge," explained Katrin Erk, a professor of linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin focusing on lexical semantics. "I think it's fair to say that this hasn't been successful. There are just too many little things that humans know."

Other efforts have tried to use dictionary meanings to train computers to better understand language, but these attempts have also faced obstacles. Dictionaries have their own sense distinctions, which are crystal clear to the dictionary-maker but murky to the dictionary reader. Moreover, no two dictionaries provide the same set of meanings -- frustrating, right?

Watching annotators struggle to make sense of conflicting definitions led Erk to try a different tactic. Instead of hard-coding human logic or deciphering dictionaries, why not mine a vast body of texts (which are a reflection of human knowledge) and use the implicit connections between the words to create a weighted map of relationships -- a dictionary without a dictionary?

"An intuition for me was that you could visualize the different meanings of a word as points in space," she said. "You could think of them as sometimes far apart, like a battery charge and criminal charges, and sometimes close together, like criminal charges and accusations ("the newspaper published charges..."). The meaning of a word in a particular context is a point in this space. Then we don't have to say how many senses a word has. Instead we say: 'This use of the word is close to this usage in another sentence, but far away from the third use.'"

To create a model that can accurately recreate the intuitive ability to distinguish word meaning requires a lot of text and a lot of analytical horsepower.

"The lower end for this kind of a research is a text collection of 100 million words," she explained. "If you can give me a few billion words, I'd be much happier. But how can we process all of that information? That's where supercomputers and Hadoop come in."

Applying Computational Horsepower

Erk initially conducted her research on desktop computers, but around 2009, she began using the parallel computing systems at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Access to a special Hadoop-optimized subsystem on TACC's Longhorn supercomputer allowed Erk and her collaborators to expand the scope of their research. Hadoop is a software architecture well suited to text analysis and the data mining of unstructured data that can also take advantage of large computer clusters. Computational models that take weeks to run on a desktop computer can run in hours on Longhorn. This opened up new possibilities.

"In a simple case we count how often a word occurs in close proximity to other words. If you're doing this with one billion words, do you have a couple of days to wait to do the computation? It's no fun," Erk said. "With Hadoop on Longhorn, we could get the kind of data that we need to do language processing much faster. That enabled us to use larger amounts of data and develop better models."

Treating words in a relational, non-fixed way corresponds to emerging psychological notions of how the mind deals with language and concepts in general, according to Erk. Instead of rigid definitions, concepts have "fuzzy boundaries" where the meaning, value and limits of the idea can vary considerably according to the context or conditions. Erk takes this idea of language and recreates a model of it from hundreds of thousands of documents.

Say That Another Way

So how can we describe word meanings without a dictionary? One way is to use paraphrases. A good paraphrase is one that is "close to" the word meaning in that high-dimensional space that Erk described.

"We use a gigantic 10,000-dimentional space with all these different points for each word to predict paraphrases," Erk explained. "If I give you a sentence such as, 'This is a bright child,' the model can tell you automatically what are good paraphrases ('an intelligent child') and what are bad paraphrases ('a glaring child'). This is quite useful in language technology."

Language technology already helps millions of people perform practical and valuable tasks every day via web searches and question-answer systems, but it is poised for even more widespread applications.

Automatic information extraction is an application where Erk's paraphrasing research may be critical. Say, for instance, you want to extract a list of diseases, their causes, symptoms and cures from millions of pages of medical information on the web.

"Researchers use slightly different formulations when they talk about diseases, so knowing good paraphrases would help," Erk said.

In a paper to appear in ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, Erk and her collaborators illustrated they could achieve state-of-the-art results with their automatic paraphrasing approach.

Recently, Erk and Ray Mooney, a computer science professor also at The University of Texas at Austin, were awarded a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to combine Erk's distributional, high dimensional space representation of word meanings with a method of determining the structure of sentences based on Markov logic networks.

"Language is messy," said Mooney. "There is almost nothing that is true all the time. "When we ask, 'How similar is this sentence to another sentence?' our system turns that question into a probabilistic theorem-proving task and that task can be very computationally complex."

In their paper, "Montague Meets Markov: Deep Semantics with Probabilistic Logical Form," presented at the Second Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (STARSEM2013) in June, Erk, Mooney and colleagues announced their results on a number of challenge problems from the field of artificial intelligence.

In one problem, Longhorn was given a sentence and had to infer whether another sentence was true based on the first. Using an ensemble of different sentence parsers, word meaning models and Markov logic implementations, Mooney and Erk's system predicted the correct answer with 85% accuracy. This is near the top results in this challenge. They continue to work to improve the system.

There is a common saying in the machine-learning world that goes: "There's no data like more data." While more data helps, taking advantage of that data is key.

"We want to get to a point where we don't have to learn a computer language to communicate with a computer. We'll just tell it what to do in natural language," Mooney said. "We're still a long way from having a computer that can understand language as well as a human being does, but we've made definite progress toward that goal."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/7QeHx5EQCWQ/130610113051.htm

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