Who wants to live for ever? A scientific breakthrough could mean humans live for hundreds of years

A genetically engineered organism that lives 10 times longer than normal has been created by scientists in California. It is the greatest extension of longevity yet achieved by researchers investigating the scientific nature of ageing.

La mayor tormenta solar en 500 días inquieta a los científicos

Una vez más, y esta vez con más fuerza y de forma totalmente inesperada, el Sol ha dado muestras de que ha despertado de su letargo. El telescopio espacial 'Tesis' registró el lunes la mayor tormenta geomagnética desde octubre de 2008, según informa el Instituto ruso de Física 'Lebedev'. La tormenta solar alcanzó el nivel 7 en una escala de 10, el máximo histórico del último año y medio. Su fase activa se prolongó de las 10.00 a las 19.00 horas. "No se han producido fluctuaciones de tal magnitud durante 540 días, desde el 11 de octubre de 2008", aseguran los técnicos. Una gran actividad solar no presagia nada bueno en un mundo absolutamente dependiente de la tecnología.

Once again, this time harder and quite unexpectedly, the Sun has shown that he has awakened from its slumber. The Hubble Space 'thesis' posted on Monday, the largest geomagnetic storm of October 2008, according to the Russian Institute of Physics 'Lebedev'. The solar storm reached level 7 on a scale of 10, the record high last year and a half. Active phase lasted from 10.00 to 19.00. "There have been no fluctuations of such magnitude for 540 days, from October 11, 2008", say the technicians. A high solar activity does not bode well in a world utterly dependent on technology.

Fossil finger points to new human species

Its genetic material told another story. When German researchers extracted and sequenced DNA from the fossil, they found that  it did not match  that of Neanderthals — or of modern humans, which were also living nearby at the time.

A Theory Set in Stone: An Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs, After All

Although any T. Rex–enthralled kid will tell you that a gigantic asteroid wiped the dinosaurs off the planet, scientists have always regarded this impact theory as a hypothesis subject to revision based on further evidence gathered from around the globe. Other possible causes, such as volcanism and smaller, multiple asteroid strikes, never actually went away,

and over the years researchers raised important points that did not fully jibe with a history-changing celestial impact near the Yucatan peninsula one awful day some 65.5 million years ago.

Pablo Antillano: "Tomás Eloy Martínez cambió el Periodismo Venezolano"

En mi generación casi nadie discute que Tomás Eloy Martínez partió en dos la historia de nuestro periodismo. En la época que él llegó al país, los periodistas de El Nacional asumían como maestros a Moradell y a Mario Delfín Becerra, y se sentían herederos de Miguel Otero Silva y Federico Álvarez, de Sergio Antillano y Héctor Mujica, de Arístides Bastidas y Pascual Venegas Filardo, de Antonio Arráiz y Jesús Sanoja. Se hacía un periodismo correcto, devoto de la noticia, el tubazo, el objetivismo y la pirámide invertida. Aunque simpatizaban, en su mayoría, con causas de izquierda suscribían las normas clásicas del diarismo norteamericano.

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Venezuela gana por tercera vez la «Letra de Oro» en Leipzig

...esta vez con Geohistoria de la Sensibilidad en Venezuela, de Pedro Cunill Grau, edición de la Fundación Empresas Polar, Caracas, 2007.

AstroPhysics: La profesora del millón de dólares

La astrofísica Kelly Holley-Bockelman, de la Universidad de Vanderbilt (Estado de Tennessee) ha obtenido la dotación más elevada de la historia para profesores jóvenes, en el área de astronomía, que otorga la Fundación Nacional para la Ciencia de Estados Unidos. Son más de un millón de dólares que destinará a proseguir sus estudios sobre los agujeros negros y a financiar el programa que pretende conseguir que su universidad sea la que produzca más doctores en física y astronomía de las minorías sociales hasta ahora discriminadas.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS NATURAL: 100 REASONS WHY

HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made: 1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.

Read 99 more reasons at this page link ( above )

Preserving the past for the future; Grant aids archival work at Institute. (Old Einstein pictures)

Princeton Township --The archivist lifted the pearl-gray cover off of an oversized folio of photographs recently found at the The National Medal of Science, Awarded by the President of the United States to Kurt Gödel in 1974, part of the Institute for Advanced Study archive collection, photographed on Friday, October 23, 2009. here. From beneath the protective tissue paper emerged a black and white photograph of the great, leonine face of Albert Einstein.

Stephen Wolfram: The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything ...

..."The climax of the book is the principle of computational equivalence, which may as well be called "Wolfram's law." After hundreds of pages of laying groundwork, presenting case after case of visual examples where simple rules generate counterintuitively complex results, Wolfram concludes that this phenomenon is overwhelmingly commonplace - it's at the base of everything from morphology to traffic jams. Then he goes further, stating that once a system achieves a certain, easily attainable degree of complexity, it's reached the point of maximum complexity, as measured by the computation required to crank out the end result. Everything at that level of complexity - and that means almost everything you can think of, from human thought to rain hitting pavement - is exactly as complex as anything else."...

Richard Dawkins: The world's most famous atheist

His new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, arrives in the celebratory year that marks Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the On the Origin of the Species.
 
Richard Dawkins home page

Pedagogía by Andrés Ibáñez

Pedagogía. Enseñar a enseñar. La falacia dice que  no sólo es necesario saber de algo, sino que también es necesario saber enseñarlo . Este principio o axioma casi místico se basa, como el amable lector habrá visto enseguida, en una presuposición no menos axial y mística, y no menos falaz que la anterior: A saber, que todos aquellos que no son pedagogos, no son ni pueden ser nunca buenos profesores.

First Solid Evidence for a Rocky Exoplanet

Mass and density of smallest exoplanet finally measured.

The longest set of HARPS measurements ever made has firmly established the nature of the smallest and fastest-orbiting exoplanet known, CoRoT-7b, revealing its mass as five times that of Earth's. Combined with CoRoT-7b's known radius, which is less than twice that of our terrestrial home, this tells us that the exoplanet's density is quite similar to the Earth's, suggesting a solid, rocky world. The extensive dataset also reveals the presence of another so-called super-Earth in this alien solar system.

Juan Aréchaga: Las revistas científicas españolas y el fraude bibliométrico

 Son muchos los problemas que continúan teniendo nuestras publicaciones para competir internacionalmente , dice el autor.

El reciente informe 2008 Journal Citation Reports Science Edition ( JCR, Institute for Scientific Information, Thomson Reuters, 2009 ) ofrece algunas novedades de interés, como el incremento, más bien escaso, de revistas españolas entre las 6.598 seleccionadas ( 0,56 % del total ) y un nuevo parámetro bibliométrico, denominado 5-Year Impact Factor, que mejora notablemente ediciones precedentes. Con toda seguridad, el último JCR ha sido espoleado por su nuevo competidor, conocido como SCImago Journal & Country Rank, desarrollado íntegramente en España sobre la base de datos SCOPUS de la multinacional holandesa Elsevier. Así, este repertorio amplía su análisis ya a  16.033 revistas científicas y, entre ellas, 227 ( 1,4 % ) españolas...¡ No hay nada mejor que la competencia para renovar productos y servicios ! Pero, también, el 2008JCR dedica un espacio importante al tema de las auto-referencias ( no confundir con las autocitas de los propios autores, que esto es harina de otro costal ), un aspecto que suele pasar desapercibido para muchos, pero que merece una especial atención por su trascendencia en España.

Schoolgirl 'wanted to lose virginity before Large Hadron Collider caused end of world'

The girl, who is aged between 13 and 15, had heard rumours that particle accelerator under the Franco-Swiss border would bring about Armageddon when it was switched on last September. At the time leading scientists including Prof Stephen Hawking were forced to deny claims that the £4.4bn accelerator would generate a black hole capable of swallowing up the earth. In the event the collider kicked into life peacefully, although it has since been beset by technological problems. But police in Brisbane, Australia believe that the teenage girl was so scared by the doomsday speculation that she agreed to have under-age sex with a boy in their school lavatories. Her fears came to light after their sex acts were filmed by another boy at the school, with the footage circulated among pupils via their mobile phones. Police have launched an investigation  under child pornography laws , although The Courier-Mail newspaper reported that they did not expect to bring any charges.

Evidence found of lake, catastrophic flood on Mars

Geologists at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum have discovered a large former lake in the highlands of Mars that would cover an area the size of Texas and New Mexico combined, and which overflowed to carve one of that planet's largest valleys. The findings appear in the June 21 issue of the journal Science.

Dambisa Moyo

Dambisa Moyo was born and raised in Zambia, Southern Africa. She completed a PhD in Economics at Oxford University and holds a Masters from Harvard University. She completed a Bachelors degree in Chemistry and MBA in Finance at the American University in Washington D.C...

...This book ( How the West Was Lost, scheduled for publication with Penguin and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2010 ) examines the policy errors made in the US and other Western economies which culminated in the 2008 financial crisis. And discusses why financial and economic experts missed the signs of the credit crunch. It also explores the policy decisions that have placed the emerging world- China, Russia and the Middle East, in pole position to become the dominant economic players in the 21st century.

The World Digital Library (WDL)

The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world. The principal objectives of the WDL are to:

Promote international and intercultural understanding;

Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;

Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;

Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.

William F. Loomis: Life as It Is ( book )

This concise, accessible book considers from a biological perspective the controversial issues of our day: Abortion, euthanasia, engineered evolution, cooperativity, and the future of sustainable life on this planet. Exploring in fascinating detail the processes by which cells come into being and multiply, Loomis clearly and simply explains the latest in complex biological research. He reviews recent insights into molecular and human evolution, the role of DNA sequences in determining traits, and the biological basis for consciousness, all of which, he argues, need to be considered when making life-and-death decisions and wrestling with questions about the limits to intervention.

Section of Cell and Developmental Biology, UCSD

La premio Nobel italiana nació en Turín el 22 de abril de 1909

A principios de los 50, junto con el joven bioquímico norteamericano Stanley Cohen, Levi-Montalcini da un vuelco a su carrera: descubre e identifica el NGF, el Factor de crecimiento nervioso. Años después, en 1986, estas investigaciones valdrán a los dos el Premio Nobel de Medicina. Es una etapa particularmente feliz de su vida, llena de satisfacción profesional: la misma que, de haber seguido la