SCIY's readership rose to a new high of 19,390 distinct viewers in May 2007, an increase of 10% over April '07.

Readers viewed SCIY's pages a total of 75,180 times in April, a 7% increase over March. In May page views increased by 20% over April to a new high of 90,303.

SCIY's readers have viewed SCIY a total of 685,228 times from September 2005 through May 2007. (Click more » for complete monthly statistics.) ...   more »

In 1915 Einstein completed his greatest triumph, the General Theory of Relativity. This remarkable theory laid the basis not just for our understanding of the motion of objects within the Universe, but the motion of the universe itself! Yet, in 1916, it looked as if Einstein's theory did not properly account for observations of the universe on large scales. To resolve this problem, he added an additional term to his equations, the so-called "Cosmological Constant". Within a decade however, observations indicated that such a term was not necessary to obtain agreement with observations, and Einstein called this addition his "biggest blunder".

Over the past decade, new observations have led to a revolution in cosmology. The standard model of cosmology built up over a 20 year period up until the early 1990's is now dead. Its replacement may be far more bizarre. In particular, new data from a wide variety of independent cosmological and astrophysical observations, combine together to strongly suggest most of the energy density of the universe today may be contained in empty space! Remarkably, this is exactly what one would expect if Einstein's Cosmological Constant really exists! If it does, its origin is the biggest mystery in physics, and presents huge challenges for our fundamental theories of elementary particles and fields. ...   more »

...Basically at each bridge along the river they seemed to hesitate, which makes you wonder how they past them going up. But that's another story, I guess. So, when the flotilla didn't work, the rescuers decided to employ a flotilla with noise. If the whales were bothered by the traffic noise at bridges (which they sort of guessed they were) then maybe making noise under water would move them back down river. All of this served to move them a little then the whales would stop where they wanted and swim in circles when they wanted. Scientists more than once saying "the whales will do what the whales want to do." Really?

Then on Sunday, they took off and swam about miles down river and toward the San Francisco Bay. By Monday things were looking good and by Tuesday they were in the bay speeding toward the Golden Gate Bridge and their freedom. -- By this time, the giant gash on the back of the mother looked like it was getting better. The scientists had been able to give both animals a shot of antibiotics. They tried to put a tracking device on the mother to follow them out to the open sea.

By nightfall Tuesday the two had slowed and were circling off Tiburon, a coastal town just three miles away from the Golden Gate Bridge. ...   more »

The ‘climate change sceptics' refer to a very small band of critics that are generally not scientists engaging in serious scientific debates, but concentrate their efforts in targeting the media. They have received significant funding from coal and oil companies including ExxonMobil, and are connected to public relations firms that have set up industry-funded lobby groups to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)”, as stated in a leaked memo.

On February 1, 2007, the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) administration announced an agreement between a consortium led by UC B and BP (or British Petroleum before rebranding) to fund an Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) for biofuels and ‘synthetic biology' research to the tune of $500 million over the next ten years ...    more »

...Evidence linking weak electromagnetic radiation (EMR) to leukaemia and other cancers has been fast accumulating in recent years... Such ‘non-thermal' effects of EMR – due to levels well below that sufficient to bring about any heating - have been observed even before World War II...

During the cold war period, a four-fold excess of cancer cases was diagnosed among the staff of the American Embassy in Moscow that had been secretly irradiated with microwaves at well below the threshold set in current guidelines. The US State Department study on this episode was described in a paper published in 1997. This was among the earliest evidence for non-thermal effects of microwaves, and many studies are now confirming the high cancer risks of people exposed to microwaves from mobile phone base stations and transmitters around the world. Microwaves are no different from EMRs in the lower frequency range in that respect; except that microwaves may be even more potent in promoting cancer and other illnesses ...   more »

BEIJING (AFX) - China has suspended the planned construction of a high-speed magnetic levitation train linking the eastern cities of Shanghai and Hangzhou due to health concerns, the official Xinhua news agency has reported.

Citing unnamed Shanghai officials, Xinhua said the project has been suspended following petitions from residents living along the proposed route worried about possible health problems from the maglev's high powered magnets.

A question of whether the project can eventually recover the more than 40 bln yuan invested in it also casts a shadow over its feasibility, Xinhua said. -- It's now 'hard to say' if the train will be built at all, Xinhua quoted Wang Qingyun, the official in charge of transportation at the National Development and Reform Commission, as saying. ...   more »

The architecture of the Infinite Discovered here its inward-musing shapes Captured into wide breadths of soaring stone: Music brought down celestial yearnings, song Held the merged heart absorbed in rapturous depths, Linking the human with the cosmic cry; The world-interpreting movements of the dance Moulded idea and mood to a rhythmic sway And posture; crafts minute in subtle lines Eternised a swift moment’s memory Or showed in a carving’s sweep, a cup’s design The underlying patterns of the unseen: Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds And metres surging with the ocean’s voice Translated by grandeurs locked in Nature’s heart But thrown now into a crowded glory of speech The beauty and sublimity of her forms, The passion of her moments and her moods Lifting the human word near to the god’s.   more »

A highly contagious and deadly disease that has plagued fish in the Great Lakes for at least two years is ravaging that lake system and has spread to fish in other freshwater lakes and rivers in the region, prompting officials to issue emergency rules and strengthen existing regulations to slow its march. -- The virus, viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus (VHSV), is not native to the Great Lakes region, so it's hard to predict how damaging it will be to the area's fish, said Rod Getchell, who studies fish diseases at Cornell University's aquatic animal health program. "It's [infecting] naïve hosts, and it's a pathogen that's in a new environment,' he told The Scientist. "That's the scary part. We don't know what kind of effect it's going to have on populations.'

Many fish species die soon after being infected with VHSV, but the disease seems particularly virulent in the Great Lakes, where it has killed several hundred tons of fish over the past two years in Ohio, New York, and Michigan, according to USDA statistics. -- The virus has already spread to the Saint Lawrence River, and managers fear that the disease could make its way into the Mississippi River drainage system. ...   more »

Thanks to Dr. David Klousie for referral to this article:

There has been much excitement in recent years over the properties of carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes are essentially a single sheet of graphite (graphene) rolled up to form a tube. Nanotubes are found metallic or semiconducting depending on the orientation of the rolling up. Metallic nanotubes display quantized ballistic conduction at room temperature, that is there is essentially no scattering for electrons propagating along the tube on micrometer length, while a resistance is present a each metal-nanotube interface with a theoretical minimum value of 6kOhm. The electronic band gap of the the semiconducting nanotubes varies approximately as the inverse of the nanotube diameter and their conductance can be controlled by applying an electrostatic gate. Simple nanonotube transistors and interconnected logic gates have been demonstrated.

These exceptional properties makes carbon nanotubes an attractive material candidate for applications in electronics where the limitations of conventional Si-based devices is foreseen to impede the exponential growth in computing power. However nanotube-based electronics faces challenges for large scale integration with the questions of metallic vs. semiconductiong nanotube selection, positionning and the metal-nanotube high quantum resistance contact. ...   more »

Thanks to Dr. David Klousie for referral to this article.

Scientists have long assumed that fungi exist mainly to decompose matter into chemicals that other organisms can then use. But researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have found evidence that fungi possess a previously undiscovered talent with profound implications: the ability to use radioactivity as an energy source for making food and spurring their growth.

"The fungal kingdom comprises more species than any other plant or animal kingdom, so finding that they're making food in addition to breaking it down means that Earth's energetics, in particular the amount of radiation energy being converted to biological energy, may need to be recalculated," says Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of microbiology & immunology at Einstein and senior author of the study ...   more »

Amazing! Astounding! Utterly cool. Hi-tech photography makes this the best David Attenborough nature series ever. The subject is earth's invertebrates, or in other words, the creepy crawly things that fill the woods, bushes and undergrowth. Insects, spiders and their kin. The diversity of these beings is vast, and their bizarre stories untold. Attenborough and the BBC spend a lot of money and time traipsing around the world using really cool infrared cameras to see at night, or pinhole cameras to see up close, or ultra-fast cameras to catch wings flapping. The view they capture of these unnoticed critters is absolutely stunning. They invert the usual view of bugs by filming them from their level or below. It turns out that when you can place your camera so that you literally look up to an ant while seeing it in its environment, then you look up to it with new respect. The bugs seem more like the animals they really are. When all their hairs, scales, and whiskers are visible, their true animal nature can be seen. ...   more »

While it may occasionally occur to workers that their [employee ID and access] badges can squeal on their movements, there's one place they probably don't expect to find an RFID reader: the bathroom. But a company called Woodward Laboratories has found a way to embed a tag reader into a product they call the "iHygiene Perfect Pump." It's a liquid soap dispenser that doubles as an employee badge reader and monitoring device. To unsuspecting employees, the device appears to be a perfectly normal soap dispenser. But hidden within its sleek plastic exterior is an electronic spy that captures the ID badge number of the person standing at the sink...The handwashing surveillance system requires employees to wear RFID-enabled badges, but soon employees' actual uniforms could report on them instead. The nation's top two uniform rental companies, CIntas (which clothes workers at Starbucks, Disney, Sears, and Wal-Mart) and Ameripride (with clients like Ooutback Steakhouse, 3M, and Cherolet) have quietly begun slipping spychips into employee uniforms to keep track of washing and rental logistics. The tags come encased in sealed plastic disks that can withstand years of commercial laundering, yet still beam out their unique ID numbers whenever they come within range of a reader device. ...   more »

Physicists at the University of Pittsburgh have demonstrated a new form of matter that melds the characteristics of lasers with those of the world's best electrical conductors - superconductors. -- The work introduces a new method of moving energy from one point to another as well as a low-energy means of producing a light beam like that from a laser. -- Using specially designed optical structures with nanometer-thick layers which allow polaritons to move freely inside the solid, Snoke and his colleagues captured the polaritons in the form of a superfluid. In superfluids and in their solid counterparts, superconductors, matter consolidates to act as a single energy wave rather than as individual particles.

In superconductors, this allows for the perfect flow of electricity. In the new state of matter demonstrated at Pitt -- which can be called a polariton superfluid -- the wave behavior leads to a pure light beam similar to that from a laser but is much more energy efficient. -- Traditional superfluids and superconductors require extremely low temperatures, approximately negative 280 and negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit for a superconductor and superfluid, respectively. The polariton superfluid is more stable at higher temperatures, and may be capable of being demonstrated at room temperature in the near future. -- Snoke's polariton trap was devised with a technique similar to that used for superfluids made of atoms in a gaseous state known as the Bose-Einstein condensate. ...   more »

His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".   more »

Purdue University professor Jerry Woodall has discovered a way to make hydrogen out of a reaction of water and an alloy of aluminum and gallium. The production technique eliminates the need to store hydrogen, he said. Mixing water and pellets made up of the alloy in a tank can produce fuel for a small engine, or conceivably a car.

The process, along with other recent hydrogen developments, could work to dispel some of the criticism of hydrogen as a fuel source in the coming decades. Although it's the most abundant element in the universe, producing hydrogen for commercial applications is expensive and generates greenhouse gases. Prototype hydrogen-fuel-cell cars also run close to a million dollars. Proponents, including some researchers at national labs, believe that if cheap, nonpolluting production methods can be achieved, hydrogen power might make its way into some types of motors. ...   more »

A scout of victory in a vigil tower, Her aspiration called high destiny down; A silent warrior paced in her city of strength Inviolate, guarding Truth's diamond throne. A nectarous haloed moon her passionate heart Loved all and spoke no word and made no sign, But kept her bosom’s rapturous secrecy A blissful ardent moved and voiceless world. Proud, swift and joyful ran the wave of life Within her like a stream in Paradise. Many high gods dwelt in one beautiful home…   more »

"In 1998, Dr. Michael Turner published a famous paper titled 'Cosmology Solved? Quite Possibly!' where he outlined seven major issues cosmologists should address in the following ten years. Nine years later, he revisits the list in an interview with the Slackerpedia Galactica podcast. He summarizes progress on each issue, adds some new goals for the next ten years, and even suggests that cosmology is now more interesting than science fiction." ...   more »

MARINE biologists in California will tomorrow resume efforts to herd a pair of injured humpback whales back to the Pacific Ocean after they strayed down the San Joaquin river delta to the city of Sacramento, almost 100 miles inland. Initial attempts to persuade them to swim back the way they came have so far proved unsuccessful.

Among whaling experts joining the rescue effort was Bernie Krause, a so-called “whale whisperer” who lowered loudspeakers into the water and played recorded whale noises. -- Krause’s recordings had played a key role in the 1985 rescue of a humpback whale nicknamed Humphrey, who had followed a similar route up the Sacramento delta. Krause, an electronic audio specialist who helped develop the Moog synthesizer, managed to lure Humphrey back down the river using sounds he had recorded off the Alaska coast. Last week he was less successful as the two whales reached a dead end in the channel. They have since been swimming in a deepwater basin used by ships for turning around. ...   more »

Designed by Roberto Chiotti of Larkin Architects, this $10.5-million facility – which received prestigious Gold certification from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system – proves once and for all that green building need not be expensive, or unpleasant to look at or inhabit. If anything, it makes a case for sustainable architecture that's so compelling, it's sad to think it remains the exception.

Surrounded on every side by some of the most dreary and depressing architecture, St. Gabriel's (670 Sheppard Ave. E.) stands as a beacon. Using poured-in-place concrete, recycled pews, specially treated glass and lots of (coloured) natural light, Chiotti has pulled off something miraculous. Essentially, he has reinvented that most ancient of architectural forms, the church. ...   more »