GPS Could Fail Next Year, Warns GAO

The U.S. Air Force may not be able to acquire new satellites in time to prevent disruption in GPS service for military and civilian users. The global positioning system could fail next year and repairs aren't moving quickly enough to prevent failure, according a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

It's unclear whether the U.S. Air Force will be able to acquire new satellites in time to prevent disruption in GPS service for military and civilian users, according to the report.

The GAO said that the Air Force has struggled in recent years to stay within cost and scheduling constraints while building GPS satellites. So far, one satellite program has incurred cost overruns of $870 million and the launch of its first satellite has been pushed back three years to November 2009.

"Of particular concern is leadership for GPS acquisition, as GAO and other studies have found the lack of a single point of authority for space programs and frequent turnover in program managers have hampered requirements setting, funding stability, and resource allocation," the report states. "If the Air Force does not meet its schedule goals for development of GPS IIIA satellites, there will be an increased likelihood that in 2010, as old satellites begin to fail, the overall GPS constellation will fall below the number of satellites required to provide the level of GPS service that the U.S. government commits to."

That could have wide-ranging implications on all GPS users, although the Air Force and others can make contingency plans, the GAO report said.

via GPS Could Fail Next Year, Warns GAO -- GPS -- InformationWeek.

Four states adopt 'no-smiles' policy for driver's licenses

Stopping driver's license fraud is no laughing matter: Four states are ordering people to wipe the grins off their faces in their license photos.

"Neutral facial expressions" are required at departments of motor vehicles (DMVs) in Arkansas, Indiana, Nevada and Virginia. That means you can't smile, or smile very much. Other states may follow.

The serious poses are urged by DMVs that have installed high-tech software that compares a new license photo with others that have already been shot. When a new photo seems to match an existing one, the software sends alarms that someone may be trying to assume another driver's identity.

But there's a wrinkle in the technology: a person's grin. Face-recognition software can fail to match two photos of the same person if facial expressions differ in each photo, says Carnegie Mellon University robotics professor Takeo Kanade.

Dull expressions "make the comparison process more accurate," says Karen Chappell, deputy commissioner of the Virginia DMV, whose no-smile policy took effect in March.

Elaine Mullen of Great Falls, Va., bristled at the policy while renewing her license until she heard the reasoning. "It's probably safer from a national-security point of view," she says.

Arkansas, Indiana and Nevada allow slight smiles. "You just can't grin really large," Arkansas driver services chief Tonie Shields says.

A total of 31 states do computerized matching of driver's license photos and three others are considering it, says the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. Most say their software matches faces regardless of expressions. "People can smile here in Pennsylvania," state Transportation Department spokesman Craig Yetter says.

In Illinois, photo matching has stopped 6,000 people from getting fraudulent licenses since the technology was launched in 1999, says Beth Langen, the state head of Drivers Services.

via Four states adopt 'no-smiles' policy for driver's licenses - USATODAY.com.

If I had it to do, I'd have my license refused for smiling, then I'd take it to court. The problem with the software is their problem, not mine.

14 cars damaged during WA couple's stripping game

Troopers have arrested a man and a woman suspected of damaging at least 14 vehicles by throwing rocks onto them from a railroad trestle over Interstate 5 near Lakewood, Wash., as a part of a bizarre stripping game.

Trooper Guy Gill says 23-year-old Joshua N. Sizemore and 18-year-old Amanda L. Madison were tossing baseball-sized rocks from the trestle early Monday. Sizemore, of Tacoma, and Madison, of Lakewood, were booked into the Pierce County Jail in Tacoma, Wash., for investigation of malicious mischief and second-degree assault.

Sizemore and Madison were tracked down by troopers on the ground with assistance from a State Patrol airplane which captured video of the couple throwing rocks. Investigators say Madison was in her underwear when police caught up with the couple.

Investigators say the couple was playing a stripping game, the rules of which involved Madison shedding a layer of clothes for every left headlight the two managed to bust. The same rule applied to Sizemore and right headlights.

Gill says the vehicles that were hit included a State Patrol cruiser. One person was injured when a rock crashed through the window and bruised his arm. He did not need to be hospitalized.

via Local News | 14 cars damaged during WA couple's stripping game | Seattle Times Newspaper.

Lunatics.

Five-million-year old sloth fossil found in Peru

The nearly intact fossil of an ancient sloth that lived 5 million years ago has been unearthed in Peru, a find about 4 million years older than similar ones discovered in the Americas, researchers said.

The sloth was found beneath the cement floor of a house in the Andean region of Espinar in southern Peru when workers were installing a water system. Parts of a giant armadillo that has also been dated to 5 million years ago were also found nearby.

The sloth, about 10 feet long, was an herbivore and lived during the Mio-Pliocene era, said paleontologist Rodolfo Salas of Peru's Natural History Museum and one of the scientists on the dig sponsored by the French government.

"This skeleton of the sloth is especially important as it is the first complete skeleton of its kind that is 5 million years old in the Americas," he told Reuters. "Previously, discoveries have been made of partial skeletons of similar animals, but from the Pleistocene era, meaning from the last million years."

The sloth was found at 13,000 feet above sea level.

Salas said the sloth was relatively small compared with other animals of its type and would help researchers better understand evolution of mammals in the Andes.

Peru's dry climate has helped preserve thousands of fossils from the Pacific coast to the Andes highlands, making it a favorite of fossil hunters.

via Five-million-year old sloth fossil found in Peru - Yahoo! News.

Hard-luck Montana town pushes to house Gitmo detainees

The tiny town of Hardin, Montana, is offering an answer to a very thorny question: Where should the nation put terror detainees if the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is shut down by the end of the year as President Obama has pledged?

Hardin, population 3,400, sits in the southeast corner of Montana, in the state's poorest county. Its small downtown is almost deserted at midday. The Dollar Store is going out of business. The Hardin Mini Mall is already shut. The town needs jobs -- and fast.

Hardin borrowed $27 million through bonds to build the Two Rivers Regional Correctional Facility in hopes of creating new employment opportunities. The jail was ready for prisoners two years ago, but has yet to house a single prisoner.

People here say politics in the capital of Helena has kept it empty. But the city council last month voted 5-0 to back a proposal to bring Gitmo detainees -- some of the most hardened terrorists in the world -- to the facility.

... Although the facility was intended to be used as a medium-security prison, Smith says it meets maximum-security criteria. Smith, a military veteran, doesn't have corrections experience, but challenges anyone who doubts the security at Two Rivers.

He says he'd be glad to lock the doubters up to test it. "We will give them three days and I'll buy the coffee in the coffee shop if they can get out. I'd be happy."

Glyn Perkins agrees on that score. He worked for eight years in maximum security prisons in Texas and says Two Rivers is the most secure facility he has ever been in. ...

via Hard-luck Montana town pushes to house Gitmo detainees - CNN.com.

Do it. Give them fair trials too. Favorite Fark comment: "Montana? I thought we were done torturing people."

Why Chimps, Monkeys Don't Develop Alzheimer's

Scientists have long noticed a curious phenomenon among primates: Humans get the devastating neurological disorder known as Alzheimer's disease, but their closest evolutionary cousins don't.

Even more inexplicable is the fact that chimpanzee and other non-human primate brains do get clogged with the same protein plaques that are believed by many to cause the disease in humans.

The answer to this puzzle could yield valuable insight into how Alzheimer's develops and progresses, and now researchers report they may have a clue. They report their finding in the latest issue of the journal Neurobiology of Aging.

They found that a "tag" molecule used to track plaque build-up latches easily onto plaques in human brains but not in those of apes and monkeys, suggesting that there is a basic structural difference between the two types of plaque.

Figuring out the difference, they said, could lead to ways to render human amyloid plaques as harmless in human brains as they are in the brains of other primates.

"What this tells us, first of all, is that plaques are structurally distinct in human vs. non-human primates," said study author Rebecca Rosen, a neuroscience doctoral candidate at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, at Emory University in Atlanta. "Why that is is a huge question [but] now we have a tool we can use to differentiate the structure [of amyloid plaques] between humans and non-human primates."

"We can use this [tagging compound] to characterize the toxic nature of the [amyloid plaques] in the human brain in order to understand them better," she added. "It also confirms the usefulness of the [compound, called Pittsburgh Compound B (PIB)] for diagnosing Alzheimer's."

But the true significance when it comes to treating or preventing the disease remains unclear, said another expert.

"This is another finding of unknown significance, but it is a finding," said Dr. Gary J. Kennedy, director of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. "None of us know why these higher primates don't get Alzheimer's disease, but we don't know why humans get Alzheimer's disease either. . . Where it leads us, I don't know."

via Why Chimps, Monkeys Don't Develop Alzheimer's - Yahoo! News.

N. Korea fires short-range missiles after successful nuclear bomb test

North Korea fired two short-range missiles from its east coast Tuesday -- a day after conducting a nuclear test -- South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported, citing a South Korean official.

"The North is continuing its saber-rattling," the unnamed official said.

The firings came a day after the reclusive communist state conducted a nuclear test and fired another short-range missile.

U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said Tuesday the international community would not be intimidated by North Korea's "provocative and destabilizing" missile tests.

"If they want to continue to test and provoke the international community, they're going to find that they will pay a price, because the international community is very clear -- this is not acceptable, it won't be tolerated, and they won't be intimidated," Rice told CNN's "American Morning."

The U.N. Security Council -- which includes North Korea's closest ally, China -- on Monday unanimously condemned Pyongyang's nuclear test as a "clear violation" of international law.

After passing the non-binding statement of criticism, the Security Council is now working on passing "a strong resolution with teeth," Rice said. "Those teeth could take various different forms - they are economic levers, they are other levers that we might pursue," she said.

North Korea agreed in 2008 to scrap its nuclear weapons program -- which it said had produced enough plutonium for about seven atomic bombs -- in exchange for economic aid. But the deal foundered over verification and disclosure issues, and the North expelled international inspectors and announced plans to restart its main nuclear reactor.

Russia, France and Japan have signaled support for new sanctions against North Korea, already one of the most isolated nations in the world.

North Korea first tested a nuclear weapon in October 2006. Pyongyang had threatened last month to carry out a new test after the Security Council condemned its test-firing of a long-range rocket and extended economic sanctions against the nation, which is in dire need of food and energy assistance.

Monday's blast, conducted just before 10 a.m. (9 p.m. Sunday ET) showed up on seismographs with the punch of a magnitude 4.7 earthquake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Russia estimated the force of Monday's blast at 10 to 20 kilotons, in the neighborhood of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs of World War II and far larger than the 2006 test.

via 'Saber-rattling' N. Korea fires short-range missiles - CNN.com.

Rooks are latest bird to use tools

Yet another animal has picked up a tool and put it to use.

Once thought a unique primate trait, toolmaking and tool use have been seen in a variety of animals in recent years. Now add to the list rooks, a bird once featured in European folklore as able to forecast the weather.

Rooks are not known to make or use tools in the wild, but quickly came up with the idea when confronted with problems in laboratory tests, British researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Faced with food that could only be obtained by pushing a small stone off a ledge into a tube, rooks quickly mastered the skill.

And when the stone was placed elsewhere, they didn't take long to decide to pick it up and carry it to the tube, according to researchers Christopher D. Bird of the University of Cambridge and Nathan J. Emery of Queen Mary College, London.

A female bird, Fry, was first to figure out picking up the stone, followed by her mate Cook. A second pair, Connelly and Monroe, also mastered the task.

The birds also succeeded at other tasks involving sticks, wire and even one where they had figure out how to bend a wire into a hook to retrieve an item.

"We suggest that this is the first unambiguous evidence of animal insight because the rooks made a hook tool on their first trial and we know that they had no previous experience of making hook tools from wire because the birds were all hand-raised," Emery said in a statement.

The wire-bending task repeated the effort of Betty, a New Caledonian crow, who pioneered that skill in a report released in 2002 by the University of Oxford. New Caledonian crows, however, were already known to use tools in the wild.

Many animal species are now known to use tools, ranging from otters and herons to monkeys and chimpanzees. Indeed, Emery and Bird report that as many as 39 species of birds are estimated to use tools in one way of another.

Their research was funded by the Royal Society and University of Cambridge.

via Rooks are latest bird to use tools - Yahoo! News.

Calling someone a "bird brain" isn't quite the insult it once was.

Craps player sets record at NJ casino

Saturday was a record-setting night for a novice craps player at an Atlantic City casino.

Patricia Demauro set a new record for the longest craps roll, hanging on for four hours and 18 minutes at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa.

Borgata officials say she beat the previous record by one hour and 12 minutes. They say Stanley Fujitake of Honolulu, set that record nearly 20 years ago in Las Vegas.

"This was only my second time playing craps, so this was very exciting for me to be a part of history," says Demauro, who lives in Denville in northern New Jersey.

Demauro bought into a game for $100 and quickly amassed a cheering crowd. When she finally lost around 12:31 a.m., after 154 rolls of the dice, she was greeted by Borgata with a champagne toast.

The casino wouldn't say how much Demauro won.

via Craps player sets record at NJ casino - Yahoo! News.

I don't gamble, but I find this interesting. I wonder about the odds of such a long run.

Five-Dimensional Data Storage

To cram more data on DVDs than the high-density Blu-ray format allows, manufacturers will have to go three-dimensional and stack data in multiple layers. Researchers at the Swinburne University of Technology, in Hawthorn, Australia, have now found a way to add two more dimensions to optical-disc recording: wavelength and polarization. The technique could pack 1.6 terabytes of data on a standard-size DVD, the researchers say—the equivalent of 30 Blu-ray discs. What’s more, it could be compatible with today’s disk-drive technology. - ieee

Traditional DVDs and CDs store data on their surface in two dimensions, and holographic discs can store it in three. Now researchers have for the first time demonstrated what they call a five-dimensional optical material. It can record data in three spatial dimensions and in response to different wavelengths and polarizations of laser light.

The material is being developed by researchers led by Min Gu, director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics at the Swinburne University of Technology in Victoria, Australia. The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic spun flat on a glass substrate. Multiple data patterns can be written and read within the same area in the material without interfering with each other. Using three wavelengths and two polarizations of light, the Australian researchers have written six different patterns within the same area. They've further increased the storage density to 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter by writing data to stacks of as many as 10 nanorod layers. In a paper published online today in the journal Nature, Gu's group reports recording speeds of about a gigabit per second.

"You can record each bit by one laser pulse," says Gu. The writing laser melts and reshapes the gold particles, which are less than 100 nanometers long. The changes affect how the nanorods interact with light from a laser-imaging system, allowing the data to be read.

The Australian researchers tailored the gold nanoparticles to respond to different wavelengths of light by controlling their dimensions. When pulsed with a focused beam of green light, for example, some of the nanorods will change shape, while others very close by but of a different size will not be affected. The response of the nanorods, which are scattered throughout the plastic randomly, also depends on the angle of propagation of the incoming light. When the polarization of the light is aligned with the rods' long axis, the rods absorb it more strongly than they do light coming from other angles. The patterns can't be erased and rewritten, but they should be stable over time.

Previous work on this kind of multiplexed optical storage relied on light-responsive polymers. "The absoption spectrum of those materials is very broad," says Gu, which makes it difficult to record at high density using multiple colors of light. The advantage of the gold nanorods and of quantum dots, another nanomaterial Gu is exploring for rewritable five-dimensional storage, is that they respond to much narrower bands of light.

via Technology Review: Five-Dimensional Data Storage.

Mars robots may have destroyed evidence of life

HAVE Mars landers been destroying signs of life? Instead of identifying chemicals that could point to life, NASA's robot explorers may have been toasting them by mistake.

In 1976, many people's hopes of finding life on Mars collapsed when the twin Viking landers failed to detect even minute quantities of organic compounds - the complex, carbon-containing molecules that are central to life as we know it. "It contributed, in my opinion, to the fact that there were no additional [US lander] missions to Mars for 20 years," says Jeff Moore of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

The result also created a puzzle. Even if Mars has never had life, comets and asteroids that have struck the planet should have scattered at least some organic molecules - though not produced by life - over its surface.

Some have suggested that organics were cleansed from the surface by naturally occurring, highly reactive chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide. Then last year, NASA's Phoenix lander, which also failed to detect organics on Mars, stumbled on something in the Martian soil that may have, in effect, been hiding the organics: a class of chemicals called perchlorates.

At low temperatures, perchlorates are relatively harmless. But when heated to hundreds of degrees Celsius they release a lot of oxygen, which tends to cause any nearby combustible material to burn. For that very reason, perchlorates are used in rocket propulsion.

The Phoenix and Viking landers looked for organic molecules by heating soil samples to similarly high temperatures to evaporate them and analyse them in gas form. When Douglas Ming of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and colleagues tried heating organics and perchlorates like this on Earth, the resulting combustion left no trace of organics behind. Ming's team presented their results at the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.

Iron oxides have also been suspected of interfering with the detection of organics, but perchlorates are probably far more effective, says Chris McKay of Ames. Even if organics make up a few parts per thousand of the soil, Viking or Phoenix could have missed them, he adds, so it is too soon to conclude that these materials are not there. "We haven't looked the right way," he says.

Jeffrey Bada of the University of California, San Diego, agrees that a new approach is needed. He is leading work on a new instrument called Urey for the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover, due to launch in 2016, which will be able to detect organic material at concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion. The good news is that, although Urey heats its samples, it does so in water, so the organics cannot burn up.

via Mars robots may have destroyed evidence of life - space - 25 May 2009 - New Scientist.

The Future of Artificial Intelligence

It’s summertime and the Terminator is back. A sci-fi movie thrill ride, “Terminator Salvation” comes complete with a malevolent artificial intelligence dubbed Skynet, a military R.&D. project that gained self-awareness and concluded that humans were an irritant — perhaps a bit like athlete’s foot — to be dispatched forthwith.

The notion that a self-aware computing system would emerge spontaneously from the interconnections of billions of computers and computer networks goes back in science fiction at least as far as Arthur C. Clarke’s “Dial F for Frankenstein.” A prescient short story that appeared in 1961, it foretold an ever-more-interconnected telephone network that spontaneously acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over financial, transportation and military systems.

Today, artificial intelligence, once the preserve of science fiction writers and eccentric computer prodigies, is back in fashion and getting serious attention from NASA and from Silicon Valley companies like Google as well as a new round of start-ups that are designing everything from next-generation search engines to machines that listen or that are capable of walking around in the world. A.I.’s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the question of where the technology might be heading and, more ominously, perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how quickly.

The concept of ultrasmart computers — machines with “greater than human intelligence” — was dubbed “The Singularity” in a 1993 paper by the computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. He argued that the acceleration of technological progress had led to “the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.” This thesis has long struck a chord here in Silicon Valley.

Artificial intelligence is already used to automate and replace some human functions with computer-driven machines. These machines can see and hear, respond to questions, learn, draw inferences and solve problems. But for the Singulatarians, A.I. refers to machines that will be both self-aware and superhuman in their intelligence, and capable of designing better computers and robots faster than humans can today. Such a shift, they say, would lead to a vast acceleration in technological improvements of all kinds.

via The Future of Artificial Intelligence - NYTimes.com.

Imagine for a minute that the Internet is already self aware. How would we know? Perhaps the only people who would know are those who are able to watch the entire civilian Internet at once with super computers, the NSA, for example.  There have been a few mysterious cuts of major undersea Internet cables.  Perhaps the government is secretly at war with the Internet and we don't know about it.

Never mistake a clear view for a short distance. - Paul Saffo

Paul Saffo (born 1954 in Los Angeles) is a technology forecaster based in Silicon Valley. A Consulting Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, Saffo teaches courses on the future of engineering and the impact of technological change on the future. In 2008, Saffo was named Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Stanford Media X research network.

He is also a board member of the Long Now Foundation[1]. He has degrees from Harvard College, Cambridge University, and Stanford University.

Saffo is frequently quoted in leading publications on issues ranging from high technology to global lifestyles. Saffo has over two decades experience exploring long term technological change and its impact on society. Since 2006, he has been on an extended sabbatical from Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California where he worked for the last two decades. He left IFTF in 2008.

Saffo is a columnist for ABCNews.com, and his essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Business 2.0, Fortune, The Harvard Business Review, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Wired.

Saffo is the author of several books, including Dreams in Silicon Valley and The Road From Trinity, and the introduction to E.B. White: Notes on our Times[2]

via Paul Saffo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

"Never mistake a clear view for a short distance. " I like this Paul Saffo quote because sometimes people make decisions based on too little data. If something works 99% of the time, you do you throw it out? Is it not smarter to simply try to adjust it, to improve it?

NASA gets cold feet on Moon base plan

NASA is dithering about whether its future plans should include a Moon base or focus on missions further out into the solar system, New Scientist reports.

Speaking yesterday, the agency's acting administrator, Chris Scolese, suggested "a shift in the agency's direction", from his predecessor Mike Griffin's commitment to a lunar outpost as part of a slated 2020 manned return to the Moon.

However, Scolese told the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies of the House Committee on Appropriations: "We were looking at an outpost on the Moon, as the basis for that [2020] estimate and that one is being revisited.

"It will probably be less than an outpost on the Moon, but where it fits between sorties, single trips, to the Moon to various parts and an outpost is really going to be dependent on the studies that we're going to be doing."

These "studies" seem to involve largely bypassing the Moon and focusing instead on more ambitious goals. Sciolese elaborated: "Recall [that] the Vision [for Space Exploration] was not just to go to the Moon as it was in Apollo, it was to utilise space to go on to Mars and to go to other places.

"We've demonstrated over the last several years that with multiple flights we can build a very complex system reliably - the space station - involving multiple nations... and we'll need something like that if we're going to go to Mars."

He further teased: "So what I would like to see from NASA over time is an architecture that... will give us flexibility for taking humans beyond low-Earth orbit and allowing us to have options for what we can do at the Moon as well as other destinations... [like] Mars or an asteroid… so that there are options on what we do in 2020."

via NASA gets cold feet on Moon base plan • The Register.

Solving the Mystery of the Bearded Lady

Julia Pastrana was history's most famous bearded lady. In the 19th century, she fascinated spectators as part of a traveling circus, dancing and singing in clothes that showed off her hairy visage and limbs. In 1857, The Lancet documented Pastrana as a "peculiarity," but modern medicine shows that she suffered from a real disorder known as congenital generalized hypertrichosis terminalis (CGHT), sometimes called "werewolf syndrome." Now, Chinese scientists have begun to unravel the genetic story behind her condition.

CGHT is an extremely rare but highly heritable disorder. Scientists are unsure how many people have the condition, but there are at least 30 cases in China's billion-strong population. Affected men and women develop excessive dark hair across their bodies and faces. Some sufferers also have a broad, flat nose, large ears, a large mouth, and thick lips, and, occasionally, an enlarged head and jaw.

Hoping to discover the genetic basis of CGHT, geneticist Xue Zhang of the Peking Union Medical College in Beijing scoured his country for cases of the disease. After 4 years of searching through medical literature, the Internet, and even television, his team found three affected families, including 16 afflicted members willing to participate in the study. The researchers scanned the DNA of these individuals and compared it with the DNA of 19 family members without CGHT. After narrowing down the search to a short section on chromosome 17, the team looked for mutations called copy number variations, in which large chunks of DNA are repeated or removed. All of the CGHT sufferers had a copy number variation in which DNA was deleted across the same four genes, the authors report today in the American Journal of Human Genetics. None of the unaffected family members had the mutations.

Zhang speculates that the mutations change the local structure of the chromosome, interfering with the production of nearby genes. Indeed, one neighbor, SOX9, is linked to hair growth: Mice without it are known to suffer from hair loss, or alopecia. If the CGHT mutations somehow alter this region of chromosome 17 so that the SOX9 protein is overproduced in hair follicle stem cells, this would cause excessive hair growth, says Zhang. "But all this is pure speculation," he says.

Zhang may be onto something, says Eli Sprecher, a hair disorder expert at the Rappaport Institute in Haifa, Israel. Another hair-overgrowth condition-–Ambras syndrome--has been linked to chromosomal rearrangements, he notes, so it's plausible that CGHT works the same way. This study is "a first and important step" toward solving the puzzle of this disease, he says.

via Solving the Mystery of the Bearded Lady -- Thomas 2009 (521): 1 -- ScienceNOW.

'Innocent people are branded as criminals,' says DNA pioneer, Sir Alec Jeffreys

Ministers' decision to keep the profiles of more than 800,000 innocent people on the national DNA database for the next six to 12 years threatens the use of genetic fingerprinting to solve serious crimes, Sir Alec Jeffreys warned last week.

The inventor of DNA fingerprinting, which has transformed forensic investigations, told the Observer that police retention of profiles - even those belonging to people never charged with any crime - had created intense grievance.

"I am getting lots of emails from innocent people whose profiles are kept on the database. I have also met many of them," said Jeffreys. "There is real upset out there. Some people are seriously distressed. They feel they are being branded as criminals when they are innocent."

In the past, Jeffreys said, people had been willing to give samples to help hunt down rapists and murderers. These included the 4,000 men who volunteered blood in 1987 as part of a police search that led to the conviction of Colin Pitchfork - the first person to be convicted of murder based on DNA evidence.

Today many potential volunteers would refuse to co-operate, Jeffreys said, because it was likely their DNA profiles would be kept by police for years to come. "This is compromising the use of DNA profiles," added Jeffreys. "Certainly, if I was asked now to give a blood sample to help solve a crime, I would have serious doubts about supplying it."

The national DNA database contains the profiles of more than 5 million individuals, the largest in the world per head of population. But last December the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg condemned England, Wales and Northern Ireland for the "blanket and indiscriminate" inclusion of 857,000 innocent citizens' profiles. As a result, the Home Office announced in April that it would remove these profiles, a move that was welcomed by civil liberties groups - until it emerged the government would not start the procedure for another six to 12 years. This revelation outraged many organisations and individuals, including Jeffreys.

"The government - having invested all this money putting 800,000-plus innocent people on the database - seems determined to keep that information for as long as they possibly can, rather than putting their hands up and admitting this is morally wrong," he said. "DNA profiles carry familial information. They reveal a person's biological relationship with others. Storing that data, from innocent people, is a straight violation of their rights to have private family lives."

via 'Innocent people are branded as criminals,' says DNA pioneer, Sir Alec Jeffreys | Politics | The Observer.

It is worse than it sounds. Anyone could be framed if everyone is in the database. Also, sooner than you think, anyone whose full genetic fingerprint is stored could be cloned. This is, of course, the king of all identity theft.

Colour-coded fuse has a flare for messaging

What with text messaging, Twitter and Facebook, you might think that we had exhausted all the latest ways to communicate without speaking. Think again, because soon you might prefer to use an "infofuse".

Infofuses are a bit like a multi-coloured version of Morse code. A message is encoded as a series of dots and dashes on a simple strip of paper. The dots and dashes are composed of three alkali metals – lithium, rubidium and caesium – each of which burns with a characteristic colour (see image). Once ignited, the flame creeps along the fuse and burns each dot in turn, generating a sequence of differently coloured lights.

In order to transmit messages using the system, George Whitesides at Harvard University and colleagues developed a code for the alphabet, numbers and four special characters (a full-stop, comma, exclamation mark and the "@" sign) based on the presence or absence of one of the three metals in each dot.

Message to mom

Extra coding information comes from the length of the dot, which determines the duration with which it burns, and the space between dots, where no colour is produced.

They placed dots of each metal on nitrocellulose paper using an ordinary ink-jet printer and ignited the strip. Using an optical detector to "read" the colours as the paper burned, they were able to transmit the message: "Look mom no electricity".

The researchers say storing information in a chemical form is widespread in biology: in the way proteins are generated from the genome, for instance.

"This combination of information technology and chemistry provides unusual strategies for communication and data storage with the potential for important practical applications," says John Rogers from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, who was not involved with the study. "This bio-inspired idea of using molecules themselves as a form of information technology could lead to entirely new classes of devices," he says.

via Colour-coded fuse has a flare for messaging - tech - 25 May 2009 - New Scientist.

Southwest's earliest known irrigation system unearthed in Arizona

Archaeologists preparing for the expansion of a Tucson wastewater treatment facility have discovered the remains of the earliest known irrigation system in the Southwest, a farming community that dates to at least 1200 BC.

That predates the well-known and much more sophisticated Hohokam tribe's canal system, which crisscrossed what is now Phoenix, by 1,200 years. The find suggests that the people who inhabited the region began with relatively simple irrigation systems and built up to more complex projects as the climate became hotter and drier.

"These are not the earliest canals known in southern Arizona, but they are the most extensive and sophisticated engineering [from the period] that we have identified to date," said archaeologist James M. Vint of Desert Archaeology Inc. in Tucson.

The site, called Las Capas, or "The Layers," sits at the confluence of Cañada del Oro, Rillito Creek and the Santa Cruz River. The name derives from the repeated layers of silt that buried the site until nothing was visible from the surface.

Researchers already knew that the site had been inhabited during what is known as the San Pedro phase of the Early Agriculture Period in the Southwest. Earlier work at the plant had revealed traces of pit houses, fire pits and ditches. What is believed to be the main dwelling is now buried under the adjacent Interstate 10.

Vint led a team of 30 archaeologists who explored the site in compliance with state laws before a planned expansion of the Ina Road facility. "We put in a mile and a half of backhoe trenches and did archaeology in all those trenches," he said in a telephone interview. "That tells us this is a very expansive site."

They identified two main canals bringing water from the Santa Cruz River and feeding it into eight distribution canals, all now buried 3 to 7 feet. The system could have irrigated 60 to 100 acres, he estimated. The primary crops were maize, which was introduced into the area before 2100 BC, and an herb known as amaranth.

Vint estimated that the village at the site supported 80 to 150 people. Their cultural identity is unknown, although they probably originated in Mexico and moved across what is now the border. Pottery was not yet produced in the region, but Vint's team found stone and cutting tools, grinding stones, antler pieces for making stone tools, and awls for basketry.

These are not the earliest canals known in southern Arizona, but they are the most extensive and sophisticated engineering [from the period] that we have identified to date," said archaeologist James M. Vin

via Southwest's earliest known irrigation system unearthed in Arizona - Los Angeles Times.

Man on the road to extinction... not woman, just man.

Men are on the road to extinction as their genes shrink and slowly fade away, claims British professor Jennifer Graves.

The researcher in human sex chromosomes said the male Y chromosome was dying and could run out within the next five million years.

But Professor Graves said men may follow the path of a type of rodent which still manages to reproduce despite not having the vital genes that make up the Y chromosome.

She told medical students at the annual outreach public lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCSI) in Ireland a second species of human beings could even be born in the future.

"You need a Y chromosome to be male," said Prof Graves.

"Three hundred million years ago the Y chromosome had about 1,400 genes on it, and now it's only got 45 left, so at this rate we're going to run out of genes on the Y chromosome in about five million years.

"The Y chromosome is dying and the big question is what happens then."

The male Y chromosome has a gene (SRY) which switches on the development of testis and pumps out male hormones that determine maleness.

In her lecture, entitled The Decline and Fall of the Y Chromosome and the Future of Men, Prof Graves discussed the disappearance of the Y chromosome and the implications for humans.

She said it was not known what would happen once the Y chromosome disappeared.

"Humans can't become parthenogenetic [asexually reproduce], like some lizards, because several vital genes must come from the male," she continued.

"But the good news is that certain rodent species - the mole voles of Eastern Europe and the country rats of Japan - have no Y chromosome and no SRY gene.

"Yet there are still plenty of healthy male mole voles and country rats running around. Some other gene must have taken over the job and we'd like to know what that gene is."

via Men on road to extinction - Telegraph.

Of course the men with Italian ancestors will be the last ones around. Might be a better world in some ways.

Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

These members, along with Gates, have given away more than £45 billion since 1996 to causes ranging from health programmes in developing countries to ghetto schools nearer to home.

They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan on May 5. The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires’ aides were told they were at “security briefings”.

Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said.

Some details were emerging this weekend, however. The billionaires were each given 15 minutes to present their favourite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an “umbrella cause” that could harness their interests.

The issues debated included reforming the supervision of overseas aid spending to setting up rural schools and water systems in developing countries. Taking their cue from Gates they agreed that overpopulation was a priority.

This could result in a challenge to some Third World politicians who believe contraception and female education weaken traditional values.

Gates, 53, who is giving away most of his fortune, argued that healthier families, freed from malaria and extreme poverty, would change their habits and have fewer children within half a generation.

At a conference in Long Beach, California, last February, he had made similar points. “Official projections say the world’s population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive healthcare, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion,” Gates said then.

...

Another guest said there was “nothing as crude as a vote” but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.

“This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,” said the guest. “They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.”

Why all the secrecy? “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government,” he said.

via Times On Line

Birth control is the kindest option. Better than war, starvation, or plague anyway.