[Jawlist] Weekly Science Report 8-21-09

Sat Aug 22 13:05:57 PDT 2009

Good Afternoon,

Below is this week's edition.  Enjoy!

Steve Detwiler

Weekly Science Report
August 21, 2009

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”
Mahatma Gandhi

News Articles

Paleontology, Evolution and Prehistoric Studies

'Neolithic cathedral built to amaze’ unearthed in Orkney dig
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6795316.ece

The peopling of the Americas
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-08/uoo-tpo081409.php

Hobbits walked out of Africa
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25948172-12332,00.html

16,000 year-old mother goddess figurine unearthed
http://todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-184230-16000-year-old-mother-goddess-figurine-unearthed.html

Hunting: So Easy a Cave Man Could Do It
http://www.livescience.com/history/090818-early-hunters.html

A prehistoric ‘runway’ used by flying reptiles
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32468704/ns/technology_and_science-science/

Why humans can't navigate out of a paper bag
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327211.000-why-humans-cant-navigate-out-of-a-paper-bag.html

Was ancient Cypriot cave a prehistoric diner?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090819/lf_nm_life/us_cyprus_hippos_2

IU discovers stone tools, rare animal bones -- clues to Caribbean's earliest inhabitants
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/11644.html

Ancient and General History

Key suspect in 1964 civil rights killings dies
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32431774/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/

Mozart may have died of strep throat complications
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/08/17/mozart.strep.throat/index.html

Obama birthplace flap evokes Chester Arthur debate
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090816/ap_on_re_us/us_earlier_president_s_birthplace

Hawaii plans quiet, sobering 50th anniversary
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32440909/ns/us_news-life/

Excavations reveal Roman history
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cambridgeshire/8207759.stm

Agricultural Methods Of Early Civilizations May Have Altered Global Climate
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090817073502.htm

Statistics could help decode ancient scripts
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327213.600-statistics-could-help-decode-ancient-scripts.html

Oliver Stone revealing 'Secret History of America'
http://www.thrfeed.com/2009/08/oliver-stone-presenting-secret-history-of-america-.html

Bolivians look to ancient farming 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8187866.stm

Caves tell a tale of an ancient trade route
http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report_caves-tell-a-tale-of-an-ancient-trade-route_1282704

Academics stoke Fromelles furore
http://www.smh.com.au/world/academics-stoke-fromelles-furore-20090818-ep3m.html

BGU Develops New Computer Techniques To Read and Study Historic Hebrew and Arabic Documents
http://www.aabgu.org/media-center/news-releases/bgu-analyzes-ancient-documents.html

Nazi Hunters Broaden Efforts to Conflicts Abroad
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 19, 2009 1:54 PM 
Earlier this summer, 400 miles from downtown Washington, a Gulfstream IV jet carrying one of the country's most infamous accused war criminals prepared to take flight as Justice Department prosecutors watched a live television feed. 
The target of their rapt attention: Onetime Nazi concentration-camp guard John Demjanjuk, 89, who had outlasted a generation of American lawyers vying to deport him from the United States for allegedly lying about his role in the Holocaust. One department attorney in the elite Office of Special Investigations died from cancer, another perished in an airplane crash and still more had retired from public service in the nearly three decades since the investigation began. 
"Even as the plane took off, I thought, 'Something's going to happen,' " recalled OSI Director Eli Rosenbaum. "Because that was the case for so many years where if something could go wrong, it did go wrong." 
On that day in mid May, Rosenbaum tracked the plane's ascent from a Cleveland airport on a journey that would deliver Demjanjuk to Germany to face criminal charges. But as employees in the Justice Department office basked in the afterglow of one of their largest victories, their anxieties turned to a question: 
What next? 
The subjects of their life's work -- people with ties to the Nazis who lied on citizenship forms to enter the United States after the second world war -- are dead or dying. Current and former employees of the OSI say the unit is racing against the clock to extradite the few elderly Nazis still residing on American soil. Jonathan Drimmer, the lead trial lawyer in the government's case against Demjanjuk, said that Demjanjuk's expulsion is "a coda on a generation of work to bring major Nazi war criminals to justice." 
Since the OSI began operations in 1979, it has won deportation orders against 107 people and prevented 180 more from entering the United States through its watchlist program. Yet it remains to be seen how the close-knit group of lawyers and historians, accustomed to combing document-rich archives in the Eastern Bloc for clues, will recast its mission from capturing Nazis to catching criminals who fled murderous conflicts in such diverse places as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The OSI focuses on revoking the citizenship of Americans who entered the country on false pretenses by lying about their involvement in war crimes, rather than targeting wrongdoers based overseas. 
The office continues to rack up international accolades for its work on the defining battles of the 20th century. "It's been the most important instrument in trying to bring Nazi war criminals to justice," said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor who was hidden as a youth by a Catholic nun. The Simon Wiesenthal Center gave the OSI an "A" for its efforts and concluded in a report last winter that it had "conducted the most successful program of its kind in the world." 
But its staff levels have settled around 28 employees after peaking in the 1980s at nearly double that amount. And many of the tools that served the unit so well are no longer available to its history detectives. Scrupulous recordkeeping practices of the Nazis, including a handwritten 1942 ammunition order that prompted a court to revoke the citizenship of a Michigan man last year in what OSI lawyers call the "ultimate cold case," largely do not exist in the modern conflicts. Instead, the Justice Department must rely on cooperating witnesses, whose languages, cultures and motives may be difficult to translate. 
Nonetheless, OSI leaders say they are aggressively shifting their focus to fresh cases, which now make up the bulk of the workload. The French historian is reading about Africa, investigators who studied Hungarian are practicing Balkan languages, and plans are afoot to hire a Swahili linguist. They're all scouring government records, diplomatic cables, refugee statements and truth commission reports for leads on perpetrators from every part of the world who may have relocated to America. 
So far the unit has filed court charges in a half dozen new war crimes cases, led by an effort this year to revoke the citizenship of Lazare Kabaya Kobagaya, 82, of Topeka, Kan., who allegedly took part in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Kobagaya, a member of the Hutu ethnic group, incited villagers gathered at a marketplace to torch homes owned by rival Tutsi and urged others to kill Tutsi by making violent threats, according to the indictment. Prosecutors assert that Kobagaya lied in his citizenship application and in an interview with U.S. immigration authorities. 
Nearly 80 similar episodes involving modern war crimes remain under the office's investigation. Congress formally expanded the OSI mandate to cover people who misrepresented their involvement in a wide array of genocides and human rights violations to enter the United States in late 2004. But navigating sensitive diplomatic and political straits in international conflicts that are still "simmering under the surface," deputy director Elizabeth White said, requires careful evaluation. 
OSI Director Rosenbaum, who joined the unit as an intern three decades ago, asserted that "unless mankind stops perpetrating these crimes, we will exist for the foreseeable future." 
The job is "obviously suffused with sadness," he said. "Meet surviving victims, and it just demolishes you. One of our attorneys spent weeks in Rwanda and was very badly shaken. We had a visit here recently from the human rights ombudsman in Guatemala. There's just no end, no end." 
The emotional pressure and shared sense of mission have fostered tight bonds among OSI lawyers and investigators. Veterans of the office say that competition with other elements of the American government, including the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and several U.S. attorneys' offices, however, could grow more intense amid angling for a piece of the modern genocide cases. In January, the Justice Department's domestic security section scored international headlines when it won a 97-year prison sentence against Charles Taylor Jr., the son of Liberia's former president, for his role in a paramilitary group that doled out electric shocks, cigarette burns, and buckets of scalding water to its political opponents. 
Lanny Breuer, Assistant Attorney General for the department's criminal division, left open the possibility of a merger between OSI and the domestic security section, which brings prosecutions for torture, rather than the OSI approach that generally homes in on residency status. 
"There are certain acts and obviously the Nazi prosecutions are an example, where we have a moral and ethical imperative to bring them to justice," said Breuer, whose 89-year-old mother survived the Holocaust and resettled in Queens. "There has to be a component of the criminal division that deals with human rights violations, no matter how much time passes."

Archaeology

4,000-year-old timber circle found in Tyrone 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/8202364.stm

Syria: 5th century skeleton found in Byzantine cathedral
http://www.english.globalarabnetwork.com/200908152214/Culture/syria-5th-century-skeleton-found-in-byzantine-cathedral.html

Scotland's treasure chest swells
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/8201090.stm

Evidence Of Ancient Village Found At Allens Bridge
http://www.greenevillesun.com/story/305210

Most of the Achaemenid Gondashlu Stone Quarry Destroyed
http://www.cais-soas.com/news/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=67:most-of-the-achaemenid-gondashlu-stone-quarry-destroyed-&catid=34

Hadrian’s Wall was built of wood
http://www.hexham-courant.co.uk/news/news_at_a_glance/hadrian_s_wall_was_built_of_wood_1_598511?referrerPath=home

17th century theatre uncovered in Dublin
http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0814/smockalley.html

Diving into the secrets of Hagia Sophia
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=diving-into-the-secrets-of-hagia-sophia-2009-08-04

5,000 year-old sites found
http://www.derryjournal.com/journal/5000-yearold-sites-found.5555635.jp

Nanoparticles Reveal Ancient Artwork
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/08/13/nanoparticles-art.html

Pyramid Found in a Field in Michoacan is a Yacata
http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=32660

Discovery of Partho-Sasanian Architectural Remains in Ultan Fortress
http://www.cais-soas.com/news/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=68:discovery-of-partho-sasanian-architectural-remains-in-ultan-fortress&catid=34

Inundation of the Upper Gotvand Dam Destroys Large Number of Pre-Islamic Iranian Sites
http://www.cais-soas.com/news/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=69:inundation-of-the-upper-gotvand-dam-destroys-large-number-of-pre-islamic-iranian-sites&catid=34

Large ancient pots found
http://www.cyprusweekly.com.cy/main/92,1,283,0,2286-.aspx

Bath house found in villa dig
http://www.iwcp.co.uk/news/news/bath-house-found-in-villa-dig-27837.aspx

Bulgarian Archeologists Discover New Priceless Finds in Krushare
http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=106907

Ancient stone artwork discovered 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/8205035.stm

Abbey and crowning site excavated
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/8205471.stm

Stones River: Forgotten stream once dominated local life
http://www.murfreesboropost.com/2009/08/16/stones-river-forgotten-stream-once-dominated-local-life

Third century CE mansion exposed in the City of David excavations
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Israel+beyond+politics/Third-century-CE-mansion-exposed-in-City-of-David-17-Aug-2009.htm

Dig unearths ancient cult figurines of Aphrodite
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1108761.html

On the Hilltop and Down By the River
http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/kadabakele/

Remains of castle found
http://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/news/Remains-of-castle-found.5570517.jp

Dig opens window on 1694 raid by Native Americans
http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Dig+opens+window+on+1694+raid+by+Native+Americans&articleId=bc46565a-0b71-4419-b2e6-518026a76da7

Ancient port discovered near shore of Küçükçekmece Lake
http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-184385-101-ancient-port-discovered-near-shore-of-kucukcekmece-lake.html

3,000-year-old butter found in Kildare bog
http://www.leinsterleader.ie/news/3000yearold-butter-found-in-Kildare.5567520.jp

Egyptology

Pharaohs' tombs 'could disappear'
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25950954-12335,00.html

General Science

5 UAVs That Are Going Places—Alone (With Video!)
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/4327759.html

Could Robots Unite Under One Operating System?
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-08/could-robots-unite-under-one-operating-system

Wired US Troops Wield Hi-Tech "Dragon Egg"
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/18/tech/main5248422.shtml?tag=cbsnewsLeadStoriesAreaMain;cbsnewsLeadStoriesHeadlines

The Secret Sauce of Hi-Tech: Obscure Metals
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/17-secret-sauce-of-hi-tech-obscure-metals/

Evolving Robots Learn To Lie To Each Other
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-08/evolving-robots-learn-lie-hide-resources-each-other

Heathrow Airport Rolls Out 'ULTra' Driverless Transit System
http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2009-08/london-heathrow-airport-rolls-out-ultra-driverless-transit-system

Physics, Earth and Space Sciences

The Mars menu: This is not Buzz Aldrin's astronaut food
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-mars-food13-2009aug13,0,5125750.story

What Came Before the Big Bang?
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1916055,00.html

New hope for intelligent life on other planets
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32403430/ns/technology_and_science-space/

US probe captures Saturn equinox 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8201595.stm

Stephen Hawking Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/08/14/stephen-hawking-awarded-presidential-medal-of-freedom/

First black holes starved at birth
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32422333/ns/technology_and_science-space/

Astronomers identify ‘super planetary nebula’
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32420577/ns/technology_and_science-space/

NASA Looks to Fly Commercial
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/08/14/nasa-commercial.html

We have a 'right to starlight,' astronomers say
http://www.physorg.com/news169537734.html

Dark Matter May be Easier to Detect than Previously Thought
http://www.physorg.com/news169121408.html

Milky Way may have a huge hidden neighbour
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327213.500-milky-way-may-have-a-huge-hidden-neighbour.html

How to Maneuver in a Space Suit Using the ‘Apollo Number’
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/spacesuits/

>From the NASA Archive: Early Apollo Lander Model
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/apollolander/

Dust Collected From Comet Contains a Key Ingredient of Life
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/08/18/dust-collected-from-comet-contains-a-key-ingredient-of-life/

2,000 DAYS OF WORK ON MARS
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/08/18/2034421.aspx

Soviet-era spaceships to do commercial flights
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32468634/ns/technology_and_science-space/

Why sun’s atmosphere is ‘so darned hot’
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32468096/ns/technology_and_science-space/

The Edge of a Black Hole
http://www.physorg.com/news169819669.html

New Law of Physics Could Explain Quantum Mysteries
http://www.physorg.com/news169725980.html

The Origin of the Universe
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=origin-of-the-universe

Inflatable Spacecraft Shield Works, Space Test Shows
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/090817-inflatable-heat-shield.html

Simple Explanation for Mysterious Observations
http://www.physorg.com/news169818384.html

NASA's Trajectory Unrealistic, Panel Says
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 14, 2009 
NASA doesn't have nearly enough money to meet its goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2020 -- and it may be the wrong place to go anyway. That's one of the harsh messages emerging from a sweeping review of NASA's human spaceflight program. 
Although it is just an advisory panel, the Human Space Flight Plans Committee could turn the entire space program upside down. Appointed by President Obama and headed by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, the 10-person panel has held a series of marathon meetings in recent weeks to try to Velcro together some kind of plausible strategy for NASA. The agency's trajectory over the next two decades, as well as the fate of thousands of civil servants and private contractors, could be affected by the group's report, due at the end of this month. 
The committee members will meet with administration officials Friday and are likely to say that under current funding, there's no realistic way to get Americans back on the moon by 2020, which has been the goal since President George W. Bush signed off on the "Vision for Space Exploration" in 2004. The current NASA plan makes a moon landing in 2020 possible under the budget only if the agency de-orbits the international space station -- crashing it into the South Pacific -- in 2016. 
Moreover, the current strategy involves retiring the space shuttle in 2010 and replacing it with the new Ares I rocket and the Orion crew capsule, which NASA hopes would be ready to take astronauts to low Earth orbit in 2016. During the long gap in NASA's human spaceflight ability, American astronauts would have to hitch rides into space on Russian rockets. The awkward plan has been seen as a budgetary necessity, with shuttle program money flowing into the new Constellation program that features the new space hardware that could eventually put astronauts on the lunar surface. 
The committee has chewed over a basic paradox in the plan, which is that, even if everything went smoothly, the new rocket would not be able to get astronauts to low Earth orbit until just about the time that the space station would be fireballing its way back to Earth. 
Although the station has never been terribly popular with scientists, its $100 billion price tag and role in international aerospace cooperation makes its early demise politically unpalatable. The Augustine panel assumes the station's life will be extended to 2020. But under that budgetary scenario, according to the panel's just-completed analysis, the current NASA budget would not permit the launch of a new heavy-boost moon rocket, the Ares V, until 2028 -- even without any funding for key lunar-base components. 
"If you're willing to wait until 2028, you've got a heavy-lift vehicle, but you've got nothing to lift," said committee member Sally Ride, the former astronaut, in Washington on Wednesday at the final public meeting of the committee. "You cannot do this program on this budget." 
Committee member Jeff Greason, an aerospace executive, derided the NASA strategy, noting that the fixed costs of the current Constellation program are sure to bust the budget in the decades ahead: "If Santa Claus brought us this system tomorrow, fully developed, and the budget didn't change, our next action would have to be to cancel it." 
NASA spokesman David Steitz said it would be premature for the agency to comment on the committee's work. 
John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, observed the panel's session Wednesday and said NASA faces a problem that has been years in the making. 
"This is a heritage of one of the many failed promises of the Bush administration -- to set out a very good policy and then not provide the resources that come anywhere near funding it," Logsdon said. 
The panel will give the administration a menu of options that includes some that require a boost in funding for human spaceflight, which currently costs a little less than $10 billion a year, including the shuttle, the station and the Constellation program. Those options will include variations of a lunar program -- the committee appears to prefer to see astronauts making sorties to various locations on the moon rather than concentrating on a single outpost at the moon's pole, which is the current plan. 
The committee is clearly most animated by what it calls the "Deep Space" option, a strategy that emphasizes getting astronauts far beyond low Earth orbit but not necessarily plunking them down on alien worlds. Instead, the Deep Space strategy would send them to near-Earth asteroids and to gravitationally significant points in space, known as Lagrange points, that are beyond the Earth's protective magnetosphere. 
Astronauts might even go all the way to Phobos, a tiny moon of Mars, where the spaceship wouldn't land so much as rendezvous, in the same way a spacecraft docks at the International Space Station. That might seem a long way to go without touching down on the planet below. But the Deep Space option steers clear of "gravity wells," which is to say the surface of any planet or large moon. The energy requirements of going up and down those steep gravity hills are so great that it would take many heavy-lift rocket ships to carry supplies and fuel on a mission to the Martian surface. A human landing on Mars is presently beyond NASA's reach under any reasonable budgetary scenario, the committee has determined. 
But Augustine said at the Wednesday gathering that Mars is still the most interesting target for exploration, and all options have to be framed as part of a longer-term effort to send people to the Red Planet. 
The panel is also pushing hard for greater commercialization of space, including using private companies to taxi astronauts to low Earth orbit. 
Some options include pulling the plug on the Ares I rocket that NASA has been building for four years. The Ares I is supposed to replace the space shuttle, the final flight of which is slated for late 2010 or possibly early 2011. About $3 billion has already been spent on the rocket, a version of which is scheduled for an inaugural test flight later this month. 
The administration's overall attitude toward human spaceflight remains unclear. The president, both as a candidate and in the White House, has explicitly endorsed sending humans back to the moon, but his decision to create the Augustine committee is a sign that the status quo strategy, which carries the imprimatur of his predecessor, is not long for this Earth. 
Any strategy going forward must cope with the obvious problem that the United States has already visited the moon, and the solar system offers earthlings few other appealing places to go that are anywhere close at hand. Logsdon said he wasn't sure that the Deep Space option, with its emphasis on "flybys" rather than landings, would be easy to sell to the public. 
"I wonder myself if just flying around and not landing anywhere would be very attractive," he said. 

Blasting Neutrinos Under Wisconsin May Yield Big Payoff
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 17, 2009 
Scientists are playing an exotic game of pitch and catch between Illinois and Minnesota. Their catcher's mitt is solid iron, weighs 5,500 tons, and is parked in northern Minnesota in an abandoned iron mine. With millions of dollars from the federal stimulus package, construction crews are now building a second mitt near the Canadian border. It's even heavier, some 15,000 tons, and is made of 385,000 liquid-filled cells of PVC plastic. 
Five hundred miles to the south is the pitcher: Fermilab, a sprawling U.S. government laboratory west of Chicago where physicists do violent things with tiny particles. 
The objects in flight are very strange particles called neutrinos. Fermilab scientists have figured out how to generate a beam of neutrinos and send it across Wisconsin to the big detectors in northern Minnesota. 
Make that under Wisconsin. Because the Earth is round, anyone wishing to send an object in a straight line from one spot on the planet to another spot 500 miles away must aim through the planet itself. 
Here's where the really weird physics kick in: Neutrinos blast right through the Earth with nary a spark. They interact so rarely and so weakly with normal matter that they can zip right through solid rock as though it were not even there -- much like light through a clear glass window. That's why, contrary to the hopes of some private contractors who heard about a big new experiment under construction, Fermilab does not need to dig a tunnel underneath Wisconsin. 
A common adjective applied to neutrinos is "ghostly." They have no charge. Until recently, it was unclear if neutrinos had any mass at all (they do, but just a smidgen). Trillions of neutrinos from the sun pass through our bodies every minute, scientists say. You could be hit with a neutrino beam right between the eyes without getting so much as a blemish. 
"These neutrinos are a type of matter that essentially form a shadow universe," said Marvin Marshak, a University of Minnesota physicist working on the new neutrino experiment, called Nova. "They share space with us, but they have very little interaction with us. So you have neutrinos going through your body all the time -- neutrinos from the sun, neutrinos from the cosmic rays coming down from space, neutrinos left over from the birth of the universe -- but they go right through you." 
Nova had been shelved due to a funding shortfall, but it's back in business thanks to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 -- also known as the federal stimulus package. Forty million dollars are going to the Nova detector in Minnesota and another $103 million are heading to Fermilab for a variety of projects, including one to boost the power of the neutrino beam. 
Fermilab is famous for its Tevatron, an atom-smasher housed in a tunnel beneath the Illinois prairie. The Tevatron is going full blast as it searches for the Higgs boson, a particle theorized to exist. In the Higgs search, Fermilab is in something of a race against the new accelerator near Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider, which is currently under repair after a problem-plagued start-up last year. 
Fermilab is also busy generating neutrinos. The physicists accelerate protons to nearly the speed of light and smash them into a target. The collision creates a spray of new particles that, in turn, decay into neutrinos. A magnetic lens called a horn then focuses the particles into a beam. This neutrino beam is already being used for an experiment called Minos (for Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search). That uses the existing neutrino detector in the iron mine in Soudan, Minn. It's an octagonal cylinder made up of 485 layers of iron. It looks like a giant stop sign. 
Of the countless neutrinos fired its way, Minos catches only one or two a day. That's in part because, by the time the neutrino beam reaches northern Minnesota, it has become more diffuse. The beam soon leaves the planet entirely and travels into outer space. 
The new detector under construction is part of Nova, which will search for evidence of what is known as neutrino oscillation. There are three families of neutrinos: muon, electron and tau. One type can "oscillate" into another. Nova will look for evidence of muon neutrinos turning into electron neutrinos. 
Esoteric stuff? Not to particle physicists. Their goal in studying neutrinos is to solve a basic riddle of the universe -- why is there more matter than antimatter? 
The theorists do not yet have an explanation for why our universe in its initial moments did not have matter and antimatter in equal amounts. The slight bias in favor of one kind of matter is essential to our existence, because matter and antimatter annihilate one another. Had the quantities been precisely identical, galaxies, stars, planets and people wouldn't be here at all. Scientists suspect that neutrinos, and their ability to oscillate from one state to another, may provide a clue to the mystery. 
"A big part of the worldwide neutrino program is to gather evidence that neutrinos in fact had a role in making the universe asymmetric," said Fermilab theoretical physicist Boris Kayser. 
"What we're after is how neutrinos change into one another. We shoot a certain type of neutrino, and, in flight, they change," said Pier Oddone, Fermilab's director. "Will they explain why we're made out of matter and not antimatter?" 
The stimulus funding has sparked jubilation at Fermilab. The lab saw $50 million evaporate from an expected budget just two years ago, and workers had been told to take unpaid furloughs. The neutrino program suffered delays. Now the Fermilab scientists say the place is humming with new energy. 
"We can't believe it. It was a little more than a year ago that we got a huge unexpected cut, and now we've gotten huge unexpected increases," said Fermilab theorist Joseph Lykken. 
This kind of basic research in particle physics has no obvious application to day-to-day life in the short run, but scientists say it's likely to change society down the road. 
"The technological impact of basic science has enormously changed the way we all live," Marshak said. "It's like when Albert Einstein came out with general relativity in 1915: he had no idea that Minnesota would use it, via GPS satellites, in order to plow straight rows of corn -- in the dark." 

Environment, Climate Change and Alternative Energy Sources

Italy launches first clean hydrogen power plant
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090814/sc_afp/italyenergyelectricityenvironmentcompanyenel_20090814155644

Backing up the Earth's biodiversity
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2009/aug/10/science-weekly-podcast-seeds-biodiversity

China to start cutting carbon emissions in 2050: FT
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090815/bs_afp/chinaclimatewarming_20090815103354

Methane seeps from Arctic sea bed
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8205864.stm

Ford: New Cars Will Interface with Grid
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/18/tech/main5249797.shtml?tag=cbsnewsLeadStoriesAreaMain;cbsnewsLeadStoriesSecondary

Search For Green Power On And Off Of The Grid
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111665647

Scrubbing sulfur: New process removes sulfur components, CO2 from power plant emissions (w/ Video)
http://www.physorg.com/news169810723.html

Cockroaches future-proofed against climate change
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17626-cockroaches-futureproofed-against-climate-change.html

How to turn seawater into jet fuel
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17632-how-to-turn-seawater-into-jet-fuel.html

A New Test for Business and Biofuel
http://www.gainesville.com/article/20090817/znyt02/908173000&tc=yahoo

Climate plan calls for forest expansion
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2009-08-19-forest_N.htm

Can Geoengineering Help Slow Global Warming?
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1916965,00.html

Biological, Genetics and Medical Sciences

Florida Hospital doctor an expert in robotic surgery to treat prostate cancer
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/health/orl-prostate-doctor-rock-star-081309,0,7303400.story

Flying frog among 353 new Himalayan species: WWF
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090810/sc_afp/asiaenvironmentwildlifewwfhimalayas_20090810104611

Drug compound kills breast cancer stem cells
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090814/sc_nm/us_cancer_stemcells

“DNA Origami” May Allow Chip Makers to Keep Up With Moore’s Law
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/08/17/dna-origami-may-allow-chip-makers-to-keep-up-with-moores-law/

Marine Worm's Glue May Aid Bone Repair
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/08/18/marine-worm-glue.html

Medicated Patch for Migraines Uses Electricity to Push Drug Through Skin
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-08/medicated-patch-migraines-uses-electricity-push-drug-through-skin

Ultra-tiny 'bees' target tumors
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/08/18/nanotech.cancer.nano.tumors/index.html

Artificial life will be created in months
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1208047/Life-order-Man-organisms-months-say-biologists.html

Other

A "Complex" Theory of Consciousness
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-theory-of-consciousness

Britain’s latest UFO files raise new puzzles
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32451823/ns/technology_and_science-space/

Strange sea creature dubbed 'Muck Monster'
http://www.wptv.com/content/news/centralpbc/westpalmbeach/story/muck-monster-strange-sea-creature-florida-water-tu/ukOqHoMA_kqFqfGeVWt77Q.cspx

Additional Informational

Picturing the Holy Land
http://www.archaeology.org/galleries/israel/

Preliminary Report on the Results of the 2009 Excavation Season at Tel Kabri
http://digkabri.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/preliminary-report-on-the-results-of-the-2009-excavation-season-at-tel-kabri4.pdf

Mars Science Laboratory, Send Your Name to Mars
http://mars9.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/sendyourname/index.cfm

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