格致

Analysing surface features can help spot high-risk fault zones, say researchers who predicted the location of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake

Some Chinese biotech companies appear to be marketing themselves to families with controversial stem cell treatments for incurable disorders

A theoretical carbon nanotube cable could not only be invisible, but also strong enough to support a person's weight

The mutation, common in African Americans, slows the progression of HIV yet paradoxically increases the risk of contracting the virus (full text available to subscribers)

Psychologists have found that babies can expand their working memory by grouping objects into categories, just as adults do

The gravitational tug of an orbiting asteroid could have triggered a dynamo inside Mars that powered its temporary magnetic field

Thirty dead crocodiles in Kruger National Park seem to have drowned because their tails were hardened with fat to swim

Distant galaxies have magnetic fields apparently too strong to have formed by the dynamo mechanism thought to create them

Where can you find explosions, deadly poisons, and spy stories? The periodic table.

Brady Haran, a journalist, teamed up with chemists at the University of Nottingham to create the best educational tool since chemistry sets -- a series of exciting YouTube videos about each element -- jam packed with information and fun.

In a clip about hydrogen, Haran and his colleagues fill a balloon with the gas and prepare to ignite it with a match, but the explosion comes after a quick lecture by Martyn Poliakoff, a soft-spoken professor with remarkable hair.

When speaking of Polonium, Poliakoff mentions the recent assassination of a Russian spy with the radioactive substance, and its earlier role as a trigger in atomic bombs.

Students should react well to the films. Each of them contains the elements of a good lesson: brevity, excitement, quick starts, closeup shots, serious information, and likeable characters. Hopefully, they will be an inspiration for many similar projects.

When you look at a pigeon, you might see a dirty, rat-like bird that fouls anything it touches with feathers or feces, but I see a waste-scavenging, protein-generating biomachine.

At a time when rising demand for meat across the globe endangers the food system, and local eating has gained millions of (T-shirt wearing) adherents, it's time to reconsider our assumptions about what protein sources are considered OK to eat.

You see, city pigeons are the feral descendants of birds that were domesticated by humans thousands of years ago so that we could eat them and use their guano as fertilizer, we read in Der Spiegel. They're still doing their part, i.e. eating and breeding, but we humans have stopped doing ours, i.e. eating them.

Numbering in the hundreds of millions, they could be a new source of guilt-free protein for locavores in urban centers. Instead, we're still trying to kill off our species' former pet birds, which (as any city-dweller can attest) doesn't work.

"Killing makes no sense at all," Daniel Haag-Wackernagel, a biologist at the University of Basel, told Der Spiegel. "The birds have an enormous reproduction capacity and they'll just come back. There is a linear relationship between the bird population and the amount of food available."

And in the developed world after World War II, there's always been plenty of food.

"This explosion of the pigeon population is due to the large food supply, because after the war food became cheap in relation to income," Haag-Wackernagel argues on his website. "Since this increase in our welfare, society has produced pigeon food in abundance through our wasteful practices."

It sure sounds like a bad situation, but put the two quotes together in the context of food production. A food source that lives on our trash that is so reproductively prolific that we can't kill it off?

That's green tech at its finest! Pigeons are direct waste-to-food converters, like edible protein weeds, that leave droppings that could be used as fertilizer as a bonus.

And yet we expend energy trying to get rid of them.

It wasn't always this way. In fact, eating pigeons is as American as eating pumpkin pie. Probably more so, on a net weight basis, actually.

A 1917 report to the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture details the story of the American passenger pigeon, extinct kin to our current city birds. The birds provided our founding fathers with a bountiful feast in 1648 when, according to Massachusets Bay Colony luminary John Winthrop, "multitudes of them were killed daily."

The report describes the many millions of birds that were killed all across the nation through the 19th century. A specialized itinerant profession even arose, the netters, who when pigeons were spotted "learned their whereabouts by telegraph, packed up their belongings, and moved to the new location." In one particularly fascinating section, the author describes the last great flock of New York pigeons on the lam from marauding bands of netters who sell their meat to market.

Possibly the last great slaughter of pigeons in New York, of which we  have record, was some time in the 70s. A flock had nested in Missouri in April, where they were followed by the same pigeoners, who again destroyed the squabs. The New York market alone would take 100 barrels a day for weeks without a break in price. Chicago, St. Louis, Boston and all the great and little cities of the North and East joined in the demand. Need we wonder why the pigeons have vanished?

That's right: Passenger pigeons were hunted to extinction because they were a popular food in the great cities of Restoration-era America.

Of course, the obvious objection is that pigeons carry disease, but some evidence suggests that they aren't particularly susceptible to avian flu. As for the meat itself, I called up the FDA's food safety line to ask how pigeon compared, safety-wise, to your average factory-farmed pig or chicken, but after one-and-a-half hours on hold, the office closed down and I gave up.

But as part of this 65 percent not-kidding thought experiment, let's assume that there's nothing horrifically bad about eating pigeon.

Really, all pigeons need is a re-branding. Just as the spurned Patagonian toothfish became the majestic Chilean sea bass and the silly Chinese gooseberry became the beloved kiwifruit, pigeons can merely reclaim their previous sufficiently arugula-sounding name: squab.

The term squab now refers to the meat of the baby pigeon, but it can also mean pigeons in general, so we can simply extend the brand back to its historical proportions. In fact, some companies like Bokhari Squab Farms are already doing good business selling the stuff: A dozen of Bokhari's live squab goes for $60.

So, go buy sustainablesquab.com and encourage your urban friends to make omnivorism local. Just remind them: Pigeons are fowl.

Disclaimer: How serious am I? 65 percent not-kidding.

Image: A composite image of scavenger pigeons on the left and squab on the right. Left: flickr/ulterior epicure. Right: flickr/vanberto.

Thanks to urban agriculture supporter, TJ Sondermann, for his Twitter research help. Even though I'm pretty sure he's not going to be eating pigeon any time soon.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

ESOF 2008 coverage

Panel cites fusion pioneer Rusi Taleyarkhan with two cases of scientific misconduct

Sixty years of bombing leaves reefs surprisingly intact

(AP) -- A Purdue University panel has found two instances of misconduct by a researcher who claims he produced nuclear fusion in tabletop experiments.

The Olympic dream of Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee South African sprinter who fought so hard for the right to race against fully-bodied athletes, is over.

Pistorius was left off South Africa's 4x400 meter relay team after finishing in 46.25 seconds, which placed him behind the four chosen racers and two alternates.

Had Pistorius qualified, the International Association of Athletics Federations had recommended that he still be left off the team for "for reasons of safety." That was only the latest salvo in the political, scientific and ethical battle surrounding his quest to compete on a pair of prosthetic legs.

Opponents of his participation feared to set a precedent favoring technologically-enhanced athletes. They favored their own research, which showed Pistorius using just three-fourths the effort expended by a natural runner to get an equivalent physiological performance from his C-shaped, carbon fiber legs. Not true, said Pistorius: his legs were one-third less efficient .

In the end, I'm glad the decision was made on the field. As for whether I would have wanted Pistorius in the Olympics -- I have no idea. Something seems wrong with the idea of cybernetic Olympians, but something seemed right about Oscar Pistorius.

But even if he didn't make the final cut, Pistorius still triumphed. He bested his own personal 400 meter record of 46.05 seconds. With discipline and hard work he overcame himself. And that's how athletic accomplishment is defined for anyone, fully-bodied or not: outracing one's own shadow.

Image: Pistorius photographed by Elvar Freyr; Iraq War amputees at Walter Reed Hospital from the  Soldiers Media Center.

See Also:

• Amputee Sprinter Denied Olympic Entry
• Measuring the Athletic (Dis)advantages of Artificial Limbs
• Wired Science Wonders 002: Frank Moss
• The World's Most Powerful Ankle
• Two Legs Good, Two Prostheses Bad?

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter and Del.icio.us feeds; Wired Science on Facebook.

Science misses out on unmanned aerial vehicles thanks to poor regulation.

Today Phoenix will continue testing the best way to 'rasp' small bit of ice from the hard-as-concrete ice-slab it found.

Luckily, back on Earth, engineers planned ahead. "While Phoenix was in development, we added the rasp to the robotic arm design specifically to grind into very hard surface ice," said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This is the exactly the situation we find we are facing on Mars, so we believe we have the right tool for the job. Honeybee Robotics in New York City did a heroic job of designing and delivering the rasp on a very short schedule."

The rasp is spring loaded, so if you push on the tip of the rod in the image (above), it would rotate back into a horizontal position. That is exactly what happens when this tool is placed on the ice. The rasp, made of tungsten carbide, spins to bite down into the hard ice and kick up shavings back through the key hole it sticks out of. It continues to press into the ice until it reaches the 45 degree angle you can see in the image.

Today the team will enhance the procedure by scrapping the ice just before rasping, using the rasp four times in a row instead of just two and then using the scoop blade to run across the rasp holes and pick up as much of the 'tailings' as possible.

A test Tuesday found that the ice recovered sublimates away over a few hours if left in the scoop. The team is practicing the best and fastest way to get enough ice sample into the scoop and to the TEGA oven before it sublimates (goes from solid to gas- like dry ice).

The team wants to be sure to be able to collect and deliver the sample quickly, and early in the Martian morning, in order to minimize the amount of ice lost to vaporization before the material is sealed into the oven. Today's plans include using the Robotic Arm Camera to check repeatedly for any changes in the collected sample during seven hours after getting it into the scoop.

NASA Phoenix Mars Lander Continues Tests With Rasp [University of Arizona]

See Also:

• Mars Phoenix Tweets: "We Have ICE!"
• Phoenix Landing Rockets May Have Already Uncovered First Ice Sample
• Mars Phoenix "Shake, Shake, Shakes" Its Way To A Full Soil Sample
• The Mars Ice FAQ: How Do You Know It's Water?

Images courtesy of NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Thanks Chris!

In the month or so since our last Mars Phoenix Lander post, a lot has been happening:

June 21: First soil sample is delivered to the optical microscope
June 25: First soil delivered to the wet chemistry lab to check the pH, and if salts present
June 26: Wet chemistry results- pH is 8 or 9 ('basic'). Soil is very analogous to the Antarctic Dry Valleys, has salt components- sodium, magnesium, potassium, chloride (table salt is sodium chloride). Salt is a general term for a compound with a positive ion and a negative ion that come together to balance each other out. The ions are often essential to life (potassium), so 'salts' (like potassium chloride) are often found in plant food as a source for those nutrients. Finding salts in the Martian soil is a good indicator that liquid water was once present, it is also good news for future Mars farmers.

The lander has also been taking 3D images of all its surroundings, continuous temperature, pressure, wind dust and cloud measurements including the first nighttime atmospheric measurements. It has dug a trench in the middle of one of the 'polygons' that it landed next to. Polygons are an arctic phenomena on Earth that are caused by freezing and thawing cycles that tend to break the ground up into a tile of more or less hexagonally shaped mounds (think of how mud looks when it dries up and cracks in a similar pattern). Digging in the middle is likely to produce a good clean sample.

July 1: Start trying to scrape at the solid ice sheet uncovered under the soil in the middle of the polygon in the "Snow White" trench.
July 2: Short circuit on the eight TEGA ovens means second sample may be the last one possible. Team decides to make sure it is a good ice-rich one.
July 7: Trying to get ice sample from ice sheet is "like scraping a sidewalk," says the 'dig Czar', Ray Arvidson. The small amount of shavings produced are also hard to get into the scoop. "It's like trying to pick up dust with a dustpan, but without a broom," said Richard Volpe, an engineer from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
July 10: Phoenix sticks fork in Mars, tests the ability of the soil to conduct heat and electricity from one prong to another. Begins test run of the atomic force microscope. It is 20 times more powerful then the optical microscope on board.
July 14: Wet lab results are "intriguing" but team wants to verify their interpretations with lab tests before releasing results.
July 15: Since the scraping isn't working, the team brings on the rasping tool! (See "Mars Phoenix Shreds Tough Martian Ice").
July 17: Phoenix 3D images released

See Also:

• Mars Phoenix Tweets: "We Have ICE!"
• Phoenix Landing Rockets May Have Already Uncovered First Ice Sample
• Mars Phoenix "Shake, Shake, Shakes" Its Way To A Full Soil Sample
• The Mars Ice FAQ: How Do You Know It's Water?

Images courtesy of NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

A Purdue University committee says the scientist who claimed to have triggered 'bubble fusion' in 2002 is guilty of research misconduct