Human arrival in New Zealand led to the extinction of one penguin species to the advantage of another, scientists suggest.
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If you were a nine-foot tall animal covered in dense fur – say, Bigfoot – you would probably seek cooler climes if temps began inching up. That’s the hypothesis one Queens College biologist posed to me last night – without, I should note, acknowledging that such an animal exists at all. [More]
Alaska is making the best use of cigarette taxes and Big Tobacco settlement money distributed to states in the decade after authorities negotiated a deal with the companies over smoking-related health costs incurred by the states, according to a new report released today by a coalition of advocacy groups. South Carolina ranks the worst. [More]
A fossilised bone from a sabre-toothed cat has been dredged up from the seabed by a trawler off the UK coast.
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The location data of satellite navigation systems looks set to improve traffic monitoring and town planning.
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It’s been in stores for only one week, but Mirror’s Edge (a first-person video game developed by Electronic Arts Inc.) is apparently causing quite a stir. Literally. People playing the game have reported feeling dizzy and, in some cases, so nauseous that they vomit, writes Clive Thompson in his Wired.com blog, "Games Without Frontiers." [More]
It sounds like something a villain might construct in a James Bond film: a laser, trained on a thin gold target, that churns out antimatter to annihilate ordinary matter. But scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have announced that they made just such a device, from which they were able to detect the production of more than a million positrons, the antimatter particle counterpart to electrons. (By this detection they infer the presence of many times more positrons, in the realm of 100 billion particles.) [More]
CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND (11/16/08)–Things have improved since the days of ship and dog sleds, but it still is not easy to get to the center of Antarctica. It will have been a month from the time I stepped into the car on a rainy Thursday until we reach our field camp in mid-December. A month, that is, if things go well. Today was an example of things not quite going according to plan. [More]
Complaints of memory and concentration problems, headaches, pain and fatigue among Gulf War vets have often fallen on deaf ears – until now. A Department of Veterans Affairs advisory panel has concluded that Gulf War Syndrome is a real illness affecting at least 174,000 soldiers, a quarter of those who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf conflict. [More]
The noise in the Pacific off the southern California coast has become 10 times louder over the past five decades because of the rumbling of commercial shipping vessels, the clicking of oceanographic research equipment, and the din of Navy operations and sonar systems–all of which are threatening whales that use the same frequency range to communicate. [More]