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"Electronics heavyweights" like Sony, Samsung, Motorola and Sharp are teaming up behind a uniform technology to send high-def video signals from transmitters to television screens, reports MSNBC.
Savvy consumers (super-nerds) can transmit video now using Wi-Fi technology, but it compresses (reduces the quality) of the picture. The new standard, called Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI), supported by the aforementioned "heavyweights" will use more powerful radio signals.
Does this mean your neighbors will be able to dial into your signals and check out what you're watching? Perhaps. But what if you don't want the neighbors to know ho much Entertainment Tonight and America's Funniest Home Videos that you watch? Pound360 bets some type of encryption is also in the works.
"Hardened, fatty deposits" are showing up in the tails of dead crocs along the Olifants River in South Africa's Kruger National Park, reports New Scientist. Researchers believe the condition makes it too difficult for the animals to swim, so they drown. Eating rancid fish may lead to the mysterious affliction, but it could be "exposure to pollutants." According to New Scientist, "the Olifants is the most polluted of all the [Kruger National Park's] rivers."
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has relayed new data showing Mars was once drenched with water, and for hundreds-of-thousands of years, reports the BBC.
Images from the Mars Orbiter show minerals on the "ancient highlands" that only form in water. The same type of minerals also appear in-and-around craters and on the slopes of dormant volcanoes (see image) suggesting evidence of a wet Mars has been hiding just below the surface. And the evidence runs deep, up to 5 kilometers down, suggesting there was a lot of water on the Red Planet.
Mars' wet period probably ran from 4.6 billion to 3.8 billion years ago during the planet's "Noachian period."
(Image courtesy NASA)
Twenty six dolphins beached themselves at the southwestern tip of England this month, and experts don't know why, reports Discover Magazine. Beach goers dragged some of the dolphins back into the water, but they just beached themselves again.
Did Royal Navy depth charges spook the dolphins? Could they have been terrified by a killer whale? Perhaps a parasite "turned them into zombies."
Last fall, 152 dolphins beached themselves along the Iranian coast in a mass suicide that eludes explanation to this day.
The short answer is, nobody really knows. In the past, Pound360 explored this question when Japanese researchers suggested oxides in the Earths crust reacted with a "thick blanket of hydrogen" surrounding the early earth to create our oceans.
The problem with that is that water in our oceans has the same molecular makeup as water in asteroids (yes, asteroids, not comets). "Molecular makeup," you ask, "isn't water just H20, how can that vary?" Well, a hydrogen molecule can have extra protons and neutrons. In the case water on Earth, much of it has an extra neutron and proton. This type of hydrogen scientists refer to as "heavy hydrogen" or "deuterium."
Worth noting is, according to a Wikipedia entry, the Earth was formed within the Solar System's "snow line" (which exists about where the Asteroid Belt is). Within the snowline, you're close enough to the sun that water is vaporized. Outside of that line, it's cold enough that water is turned to ice. Of course, if water is vapor, it's tough for a small planet or moon to attract and keep it.
As the Earth formed, much of the water present (yes there was some) was "outgassed" and drifted away in the solar wind. It wasn't until the Earth got much larger that its gravity was capable or retaining the original water which continued to seep from the interior of the Earth via volcanic activity. But that would only account for some of the water we have today.
The Wikipedia entry also acknowledges extraterrestrial sources like asteroids and homemade sources like photosynthesis. Indeed, early life synthesizing hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and carbon dioxide (CO2) would have released H20 (and some other stuff).
Another possibility according to the Wikipedia write-up, the massive object that (probably) collided with the Earth 4-point-some-billion-years-ago creating the Moon may have been an icy planetoid like Jupiter's moon Europa. But Pound360 wonders how that might have happened since this frozen wanderer would have had to drift from beyond the Solar System's "snow line," right? And that means it would have had to escape Jupiter's tremendous pull, which seems to us (in our pretty limited understanding of astrophysics) unlikely.
As Pound360 mentioned previously, researchers continue to learn from the 842 pounds of lunar rocks retrieved over the course of the Apollo missions that ended 40 years ago. Recently, the NY Times ran a feature on what we've learned and why we're still learning stuff today (the main reason is that research technologies and methods keep advancing).
Among the most important findings from Moon rocks: - Meteors, not volcanoes, are primarily responsible for shaping the surface of the Moon.
- An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. How can the Moon tell us that? "Terrestrial mineral and crystal deposits 65 million years old were similar to those found routinely in lunar ejecta."
- The Moon is just about as old as the earth, solar system. One rock, what scientists refer to as the "genesis" rock, is almost 4.5 billion years old. The is about 4.54 billion years old. The solar system formed just 4.6 billion years ago. It must have been an amazing 200 million years.
- Using what we know about the Moon's surface, we predict the age of surfaces on other Moons, planets in the solar system.
In addition to these accepted findings is a more controversial one that may shed light on how life evolved on . According to the Times, "some researchers have suggested" lunar impacts tapered off soon after the Moon formed (about 4.3 billion years ago), only to "resume with a vengeance" 400 million years later. The "cataclysm" would have affected Moon and Earth at a time "when life was just beginning."
Pound360 has some questions. Did the "cataclysm" spark life on this planet? Perhaps in the onslaught of asteroids, comets or whatever, one (or a few) of them carried genetic material (not an all together crazy idea) or bacteria (another crazy but not so ridiculous idea) at a time when the Earth was first receptive to life (after the planet cooled and oceans formed).
Also, where did the material that made up this cataclysmic shower of material come from? Was there another planet out there in the same space as Mars, and did the two of them collide? There is evidence that Mars was struck by the "largest impact in the solar system." Perhaps the two planets crashed, Mars survived, and the remnants of the other planet either showered the inner solar system with debris or continue to drift in the space between Mars and Jupiter we call the Asteroid Belt.
As this post developed, Pound360 dug into the origins of the Asteroid Belt and learned at Wikipedia that astronomers in the early nineteenth century postulated the Belt was formed by a shattered planet. (Pound360 figured that was about right, that we're about 200 years behind the science community.) Alas, there are two problems. One, material in the asteroid belt varies too widely in chemical composition to have come from a single planet. Two, the combined mass of the entire asteroid belt is "a small fraction of the mass of the Earth's Moon."
So there's a drink out there called Borba. No, not boba, that drink with the great big gell-ball things in them. Borba. It's "skin balance water." On the bottle, it claims to "diminish skin's dryness, sensitivity and roughness" (at least that's what it says on the lychee-flavored bottle that Pound360 tested).
It's expensive, too. The bottle we got was on sale for $2.50 (which, we believe was 50 percent off). It tasted okay. Zero calories. But we didn't notice whether or not our skin was any less dry, sensitive or rough.
Now, we wouldn’t argue that this stuff is useless. We're pretty sure if you drink, say, 10 bottles of Borba a day, there would be an impact on skin health (it's tough to tell because it only says to drink Borba "daily" on the bottle -- but neglects to say how much daily -- to "enhance skin").
To make sure consumers know what they're getting into, the manufacturers of this stuff should be required to say exactly how many bottles a day are required to maintain the advertised results. Yes, a big black sticker that says, "It is required that you drink 10 bottles a day of this stuff to get the advertised result." That way a consumer understands it will take $50 per day (if it actually takes 10 bottles daily to get the result) or $1,500 per month to get the same result that, say, you could get from an $8 bottle of skin moisturizer.
Using an all-star lineup of telescopes (Hubble, Spitzer, Keck and others), astronomers studying a very, very distant galaxy are making some surprising findings. First, it's the brightest starburst-class galaxy discovered.
Also, a NASA press release claims at 12.3 billion light-years away it's the most distant galaxy ever found (however, last year, Pound360 heard astronomers had found a galaxy 13 billion light years away… but what's a few hundred million light years at these distances, right?). Since the universe is only 13.7 billion years old, astronomers are observing activity just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang.
As if all that weren’t enough, this galaxy is cranking out stars like nothing scientists have ever seen: 4,000 per year. Our galaxy only makes 10 stars per year. At the rate of 4,000 stars per year, the distant galaxy would reach the size of "the most massive ones we see today" in just 50 million years (a blink on the cosmic timescale).
The rate of star formation forces us to rethink what we know about how galaxies form. Conventional wisdom suggested galaxies grow by absorbing other, smaller galaxies (or stealing parts of bigger ones). But if galaxies can grow at 4,000 stars per year, they don't need to absorb anything to reach the sizes we're observing out there.
(Image courtesy NASA. And we have no idea what it is. It was in the press release so we thought we'd toss it in.)
When considering regulations, the government assigns a value to individual human lives to weigh the costs (how much it will take to enforce a regulation) and benefits (the combined value of all the lives saved). The value of an individual is determined by the EPA, and it’s fallen steadily from around $8 million in 2001 to $6.9 million this year, reports MSNBC.
Pound360 personally feels like a million bucks. Usually does. So we were pretty thrilled to hear we were worth seven-times that! But that’s neither here-nor-there…
Talk about adding insult to injury. Thanks EPA. As if it weren’t bad enough that housing prices are crashing, the stock market is in free fall, gas prices are up and it costs more to buy a sack of groceries.
Could the falling value of an American have anything to do with the falling value of the dollar? Maybe it’s the president who’s been in office since 2000?
"Some environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of changing the value to avoid tougher rules,” reports MSNBC.
The EPA gets their number from economists that “calculate the value based on what people are willing to pay to avoid certain risks, and on how much extra employers pay their workers to take on additional risks.”
Pears and apples seem similar enough. Compared to an orange or banana, pears and apples have a similar texture, taste kind of the same, have the same kind of skin and so on.
So why do pears rot so much faster? The biggest difference between the two, at first glance, is the shape. But that has nothing to do with it. It's all about the microscopic structure the fruits use to move oxygen from skin to core, according to a report at the BBC.
Using a "giant X-ray machine able to resolve features down to and below a thousandth of a millimeter," researchers found pears use a smooth network of channels whereas apples have "irregular cavities" used to pass oxygen around. Apples have "much less water… to slow the penetration of gas," too.
As atmospheric CO2 levels skyrocket, ocean water is warmer (by almost two degrees) and more acidic (30 percent more), and that's killing coral, reports the Nightly News.
According to the report, "One third of corals face extinction by 2050."
So what? Twenty-five percent of ocean species rely on coral for their survival. And one billion people rely on fish as their "primary source of protein."
Check out the video…
- Let's say you're second in command of the world's most powerful country -- or any country -- and you're given information that greenhouse gas is endangering the health of your citizens. What do you do? Here are some options:
- A) Take action to cut greenhouse gasses
- B) Ignore the info
- C) Have the info manipulated so it doesn't say greenhouse gasses are deadly
Most well-adjusted, normal human beings would select A. But if you're the second most powerful person in the world, and your name is Dick Cheney, you pick C.
Pound360 would like to enact a new law. Anyone that voted for Bush/Cheney must pay double taxes over the next five years. The extra taxes would go towards discounting the taxes of everyone else in the country cleaning up the environment. Anyone that voted for Bush/Cheney twice should pay double taxes for 10 years.
Back to this business of manipulating climate testimony. Former EPA official Jason K. Burnett recently revealed Cheney's office "was deeply involved" in cutting half of Center for Disease Control and Prevention testimony last fall demonstrating climate change is harmful to people's health, reports ABC News.
According to the CDC, "manmade pollution is warming the Earth" and will both increase the spread of disease and cause injuries from severe weather.
Burnett (a "lifelong Democrat") was told by Cheney's Office to "remove from the testimony any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change."
