[Jawlist] Weekly Science Report 10-2-09

Sat Oct 3 15:16:33 PDT 2009

Good Evening Everyone,

Below is this week's edition.  Enjoy!

Steve Detwiler

Weekly Science Report
October 2, 2009

“We need to reshape our space efforts away from flags and footprints stunts and toward the use of resources of the ocean of space to benefit the environment ad economy of the Earth.  Any child in the 1960s could tell you in four words why America was committed to the Apollo program; to best the Russians.  The principal reason that we need to explore and utilize the Moon can be expressed in these four words.  To save the Earth”
Author Unknown

News Articles

Paleontology, Evolution and Prehistoric Studies

The Angry Evolutionist
http://www.newsweek.com/id/216140

'Nation's oldest stone tools found'
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20090930TDY01201.htm

Hobbit species may not have been human
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,24897,26143116-12332,00.html

Evidence for Stone Age Multitasking
http://www.livescience.com/history/090928-stoneage-multi-task.html

Did lowly parasite kill famous T. rex?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33074883/ns/technology_and_science-science/

Prehistoric shark nursery spawned giants
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33074897/ns/technology_and_science-science/

How Did Evolution Begin?
http://www.physorg.com/news173351870.html

Megafauna Extinctions Not Entirely Humans’ Fault
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/australia-pleistocene-extinctions/

Oldest human skeleton offers new clues to evolution
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/10/01/oldest.human.skeleton/index.html

ARMENIA: ARCHEOLOGISTS SAY THEY’VE FOUND REMAINS OF WORLD’S OLDEST HUMAN BRAIN
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insightb/articles/eav093009b.shtml

What (Maybe) Didn't Kill the Dinosaurs: Comets
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-maybe-didnt-kill-the-dinos

Earth's 'boring billion' years blamed on sulfur-loving microbes
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/47914/title/Earths_boring_billion_years_blamed_on_sulfur-loving_microbes

Cluster of dinosaur eggs found in India
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33138407/ns/technology_and_science/

Ancient and General History

Skull piece thought to be Hitler's is from woman
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090929/ap_on_re_us/us_hitler_s_skull

In search of the Hill's Freemasons
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090928/pl_politico/27639

Omrit - Herod's mystery temple?
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1253198156150&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

Symbols akin to Indus valley culture found
http://www.manoramaonline.com/cgi-bin/MMOnline.dll/portal/ep/contentView.do?contentType=EDITORIAL&programId=1073750969&articleType=&contentId=6032010

Sept. 29, 1898: Stalin’s Scientist Sees First Light
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/09/0929lysenko/

In his hometown, Mao a source of pride 
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/09/13/mao.china/index.html

Warsaw Ghetto uprising leader Edelman dies at 90
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091002/ap_on_re_eu/eu_poland_obit_edelman

Archaeology

Rome archaeologists find 'Nero's party piece' in dig
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/29/nero-rome-archaeologists-dining-room

Archaeologists to search for Arghun Shah’s grave near Soltanieh Dome
http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=204085

200 valuable porcelain artifacts found on ancient Chinese merchant vessel
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-09/26/content_12114668.htm

Dig reveals ancient fields
http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/310755

Basilica and martyr tomb discovered at Zrze archaeological site
http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/8380/2/

Archaeological dig yields clues to ancient Ohio
http://www.coshoctontribune.com/article/20090928/NEWS01/909280302/1002/Dig-yields-clues-to-ancient-Ohio

A Roman Military Camp in Bulgaria
http://www.archaeology.eu.com/weblog/cambustica.pdf

Archaeologists probe city's past
http://www.wanganuichronicle.co.nz/have-your-say/news/archaeologists-probe-citys-past/3904708/

Roman Statues Found in Blue Grotto
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/09/28/blue-grotto-statues.html

Lost legs found in Siem Riep
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2009092928628/National-news/lost-legs-found-in-siem-riep.html

Chilean Family Finds Millennia-Old Human Bones in Yard
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=344605&CategoryId=14094

Dig along upper Hudson opens window to old NY fort
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hgVyGqpprF8Yq_cDrguqxwz0vylAD9AV5SKO2

Startling evidence of a Stone Age structure in the Solent.
http://www.thisishampshire.net/news/4651158.The_secrets_of_the_deep/

Artifact find key in filling gaps in First Nation history
http://thechronicleherald.ca/NovaScotia/1144747.html

Pennies from William the Conqueror's reign unearthed in the Cotswolds
http://www.wiltsglosstandard.co.uk/news/4652660.Pennies_from_William_the_Conqueror_s_reign_unearthed_in_the_Cotswolds/

Fighter jet missing 5 decades found off California coast 
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/09/29/california.missing.jet.found/index.html

Archaeologists Discover Amphitheatre In Excavation Of Portus, Ancient Port Of Rome
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090930194337.htm

Sand trap yields cannonball
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20091001/COUNTY090101/910010317/1164/COUNTY09/Sand+trap+yields+cannonball

Archaeologist's Team May Be Closer To Finding Bradley's Crash Site
http://www.courant.com/community/windsor-locks/hc-bradley-dig-1001.artoct01,0,7977233.story

Polychrome mural found in archaeological complex of Chotuna
http://www.andina.com.pe/Ingles/Noticia.aspx?Id=8Z5+HxcYzsE=

Stone Age village found under sea
http://www.iwcp.co.uk/news/news/stone-age-village-found-under-sea-28794.aspx

Cyprus - Completion of the archaeological excavations at Choirokoitia for 2009
http://www.isria.com/pages/30_September_2009_90.php

Ancient lighthouse to be saved
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=ancient-lighthouse-to-be-saved-2009-09-30

Egyptology

TB the culprit in the great mummy whodunnit
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090929/sc_afp/sciencehistoryhealthmummy_20090929233342

General Science

Disarmingly Cute: 8 Military Robots That Spy, Fly, and Do Yoga
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2009/09/28/disarmingly-cute-8-military-robots-that-spy-fly-and-do-yoga/?pid=54

Powerful lasers, futuristic digital cameras, 3-D television and more
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/osoa-plf100109.php

Fabric Antenna Could Yield Star Trek-like Clothing-Phones
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-10/fabric-antenna-inches-closer-star-trek-clothing-phone

Physics, Earth and Space Sciences

Space Probe Soon to Study Mercury’s Comet-Like “Tail”
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/09/29/space-probe-soon-to-study-mercurys-comet-like-tail/

Cloudy with a chance of pebble showers: Simulation suggests rocky exoplanet has bizarre atmosphere
http://www.physorg.com/news173458073.html

World's most sensitive astronomical camera developed
http://www.physorg.com/news173444006.html

China 'completes 3D moon map'
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090929/sc_afp/chinaspacemoon_20090929135853

US 'red tape' dogged India Moon mission
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8281480.stm

Hawking gives up academic title 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cambridgeshire/8282358.stm

EU launches satellite system to fine-tune GPS
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33119084/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/

New ancient fungus finding suggests world's forests were wiped out in global catastrophe
http://www.physorg.com/news173634124.html

A Second Look at Apollo 11
http://www.physorg.com/news173632266.html

First light for BOSS -- a new kind of search for dark energy
http://www.physorg.com/news173626603.html

China's 'weather modification' works like magic
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/oct/01/china-cloud-seeding-parade

How Earth’s Hum Could Help Us Map Mars
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/hummingearth-2/#Replay

Stem cells point to space ills
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/09/28/2698631.htm

GOCE Harnesses Ion Propulsion to Capture First 'Gravity Map' of Earth
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-10/goce-harnesses-ion-propulsion-capture-first-accurate-gravity-map-earth

Space tourism yet to fly, 5 years since 1st flight
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_space_tourism

Environment, Climate Change and Alternative Energy Sources

Renewable hydrogen production becomes reality at winery
http://www.physorg.com/news173451507.html

High tech may pinpoint Antarctica sea rise risks
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090928/sc_nm/us_climate_antarctica

Copenhagen negotiating text: 200 pages to save the world?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/28/copenhagen-climate-text

Malawi windmill boy with big fans 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8257153.stm

Take Down the Dams, and Make Way for Salmon!
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/10/01/take-down-the-dams-and-make-way-for-salmon/

Ancient rainforests resilient to climate change
http://www.physorg.com/news173641201.html

Gaming Tech Aids Scientists Building Virtual Synthetic Chromatophore
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gpu-aids-photosynthesis

Farmed Out: How Will Climate Change Impact World Food Supplies?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-will-climate-change-impact-world-food-supplies

EPA To Impose New Greenhouse Gas Regulations 
http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2009-10/epa-impose-new-greenhouse-gas-regulations

Scientist Theorizes Ancient Farmers Caused Climate Change
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 28, 2009 
Has climate change actually been around as long as the pyramids? 
It's an odd-sounding idea: this problem is usually assumed to be a modern one, the product of a world created by the Industrial Revolution and powered by high-polluting fossil fuels. 
But an emeritus professor at the University of Virginia has suggested that man really began altering the climate thousands of years ago, as primitive farmers burned forests and built methane-bubbling rice paddies. Those practices produced enough greenhouse gases, he says, to warm the world by a degree or more. 
Other scientists, however, have said this idea is deeply flawed -- and might be used to dampen modern alarms over climate change. 
Understanding their debate requires a tour through polar ice sheets, the inner workings of the carbon molecule, the farming habits of 5,000 year-old Europeans, and trapped air bubbles more ancient than Rome. 
"The greenhouse gases went up, and they should have gone down," many thousands of years ago, said William Ruddiman, the Virginia professor emeritus, said. "Why did that happen?" 
His answer is based on circumstantial evidence. Ruddiman said two unusual events in world history -- an apparent shift in the composition of the atmosphere, and the first explosion of human agriculture -- take place at very nearly the same time. 
"Greenhouse gases do something they never did before," Ruddiman said. "And humans do something the earth [had] never seen before." 
Ruddiman first proposed his idea of ancient climate change in 2003. But he returned to the subject last month, in a paper intended to rebut one major criticism -- that there just weren't enough people alive back thousands of years ago for their emissions to make a difference. 
Ruddiman's response: yes, there were. That's because in those primitive days, one farmer was as destructive as many farmers today. 
He and Erle Ellis, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, wrote in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews that early farmers didn't have modern fertilizer or factory-made tools -- but they did have a lot of land. So they would cut down or burn down an area, farm that ground until it was nearly barren, and move on. 
"Those tens of millions [of people] had the impact of hundreds of millions, because per person, they had 10 times the impact," Ruddiman said. "And that's enough to start the curve turning around." 
To start the curve turning: this is the heart of Ruddiman's arguments -- and his critics' complaints. Where he sees a human impact on the curving plot of global temperatures, they see a misunderstanding of what nature was doing at the time. 
"I think it's a bunch of bosh," said Wallace Broecker, a professor at Columbia University. Broecker said he worried that the idea that pre-modern people were carbon emitters would turn into an argument that modern people shouldn't worry so much about their own pollution: "I get really upset with him, because people who oppose global warming [legislation] can use this as some dodge." 
The science of this debate begins with the idea that the earth has natural freeze-and-thaw cycles, driven heavily by changes in its orbit. The planet is now in a warm "interglacial" period, which began 10,000 years ago with the end of the last Ice Age. 
Starting more than 8,000 years ago, Ruddiman said, things should have started slowly cooling off again. 
But for some reason, he said, the cooling was less than expected. 
Ruddiman thinks the reason why is revealed in long "cores" taken from polar ice, in which tiny bubbles of air have been trapped for thousands of years. He's examined these bubbles, and found that about 5,000 years ago, they began showing unexpected increases in carbon dioxide and methane. 
His theory is that these gases were pollutants, produced by civilizations on several continents that were picking up the settled life of farmers. 
The carbon dioxide, Ruddiman said, could have come from smoke, from forests burned to clear new farmland on several continents. It could have seeped out of chopped-down trees as they rotted. The methane, a byproduct of decay in swampy water, could have come from areas of Asia newly flooded to farm rice. It also might have been expelled by livestock. 
In the atmosphere, Ruddiman says, these gases trap solar heat that might otherwise have bounced back out to space. They were greenhouse gases -- then the same as now. 
His theory is that this trapped heat, amplified by natural feedback cycles, may have kept the earth's temperature steady, when it otherwise might have slipped back toward an ice age. That effect lasted until modern times, he said: temperatures might be more than one degree Fahrenheit higher than they would have been. 
These early farmers "did not . . . change the actual climate," said Ellis, Ruddiman's collaborator on this summer's paper. "They kept the climate from changing." 
But Ruddiman's critics say he's wrong to see man's impact here: nature was in control all along. 
"I think it's more or less a hypothesis without any evidence to support [it]," said Ken Caldeira, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in California. 
In fact, critics of Ruddiman say, there is strong scientific evidence to prove him wrong. They say that recent studies of very deep ice samples show that Ice Ages didn't always come and go on the same schedule. That could throw off Ruddiman's calculations about when the next round of cooling was supposed to start. 
And there is evidence, they say, inside the carbon atoms themselves. Carbon atoms that come from plants can be tracked, by looking at the number of neutrons in their nucleus. If Ruddiman was right, and ancient farmers burned enough plants to change the climate, then the amount of carbon from plants in those bubbles would go up significantly. 
But, they say, it didn't. 
"The general feeling [about Ruddiman's theories] in the community is, 'Interesting -- but probably not,'" said Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. 
Ruddiman, though, says he has science-based counter-arguments on both points. 
One thing all sides agree on: the suggestion that early farmers were causing climate change is not a sign that modern humans can stop worrying about it. 
Ruddiman said there is still a need to cap and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, since modern smokestacks and tailpipes are pumping them out at a level that dwarfs anything from earlier eras. 

Biological, Genetics and Medical Sciences

Paper: Dialysis patients not told of transplants
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-09-27-transplant-kidney_N.htm

850 Mostly Blind, Pale Creatures Discovered Underground
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090928/sc_livescience/850mostlyblindpalecreaturesdiscoveredunderground

Rediscovering the dragon's paradise lost
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-09/plos-rtd092809.php

Scientists engineer E. coli to trace faces, images
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33078782/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/

Mystery Solved: Marine Microbe Is Source of Rare Nutrient
http://www.physorg.com/news173460031.html

Genetically Modifying Songbirds to Study Human Brain Growth
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/gm-songbirds/

The Big Idea That Might Beat Cancer and Cut Health-Care Costs by 80 Percent
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/new-science-of-health/big-idea-beat-cancer-cut-health-care-costs-80-percent/

To Detect Domestic Abuse Earlier, Call in a Robo-Doc
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/10/01/to-detect-domestic-abuse-earlier-call-in-a-robo-doc/

Genetic Testing of African Refugees Raises Outcry From Scientists
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/09/30/genetic-testing-of-african-refugees-raises-outcry-from-scientists/

Iowa State University researcher uncovers potential key to curing tuberculosis
http://www.physorg.com/news173628775.html

Most babies born this century will live to 100
http://www.physorg.com/news173644547.html

Scientists find missing puzzle piece of powerful DNA repair complex
http://www.physorg.com/news173618253.html

Other

Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf_deadhand?currentPage=all#

2012: THE END IS NOT NEAR
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/10/01/2086189.aspx

There is some truth in ‘Paranormal Activity’
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33126785/ns/technology_and_science-science/

Post-human Earth: How the planet will recover from us
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427281.300-posthuman-earth-how-the-planet-will-recover-from-us.html

Mysterious Orang Pendek apeman spotted by British expedition
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6247868/Mysterious-Orang-Pendek-apeman-spotted-by-British-expedition.html

The Future of Public Transportation Will Involve Personal Helicopters, Mag-Lev Cars and Zeppelins
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-10/future-public-transportation-involves-personal-helicopters-mag-lev-cars-and-zeppelins

Additional Informational

Five bizarre objects
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/science/Five-bizarre-objects/articleshow/5067214.cms

Ardi: What Does She Tell Us About Us? (Slide Show)
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/ardi-hominid-chimp/

Monsters of the skies: giant beasts that ruled the air
http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn17885-beasts-from-the-sky

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