:Peanut Butter News

Full Story At  Newsweek.com

Dallas Hextell was just a baby when his parents bought him a walker—not because he was late reaching a milestone, but because they worried he might never toddle on his own. At 9 months he had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, a form of brain injury caused by oxygen deprivation in utero or at birth. A neurologist had told Derak and Cynthia Hextell there was no cure, that it was best to wait and see if their son improved. But Cynthia, after months of research, enrolled Dallas in a highly experimental trial at Duke University, where a pediatric-transplant surgeon infused him with a sample of his own stem cells harvested from his umbilical-cord blood. A few days later, Derak and Cynthia went home with their son, who was 18 months old and still not crawling, much less walking or talking. They “stared at him” for a week, says Cynthia. “One day he just started saying, ‘Mama, mama, mama.’ And I started crying.” The Hextells ended up donating the walker to another child. By 2, Dallas was not only walking unaided, he was chasing the family dogs.

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Full Story At  Reuters

OZNAN, Poland (Reuters) - An ancient technique of plowing charred plants into the ground to revive soil may also trap greenhouse gases for thousands of years and forestall global warming, scientists said on Friday.

Heating plants such as farm waste or wood in airtight conditions produces a high-carbon substance called biochar, which can store the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and enhance nutrients in the soil.

Plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow. Subsequently storing that carbon in the soil removes the gas from the atmosphere.

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Full Story At  Reuters

GENEVA (Reuters) - Repairing the giant particle collider built to simulate the “Big Bang” could cost up to 35 million Swiss francs ($29 million), the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Friday.

Announcing a further delay to the Large Hadron Collider’s resumption, now expected in summer, CERN spokesman James Gillies said repairs will cost 15 million Swiss francs, and spare parts would cost another 10-20 million Swiss francs.

The massive collider, the largest and most complex machine ever made, has already cost 10 billion Swiss francs to build, supported by CERN’s 20 European member states and other nations including the United States and Russia.

“We will not be going to our member states asking for more money, we will deal with it within the current CERN budget,” Gillies said.

The collider was designed to recreate conditions just after the Big Bang, believed by most cosmologists to have created the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

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Full Story At  washingtonpost.com

A glimpse of our changing natural environment and how humans may be impacting it.

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Full Story At Wired.com

Pentagon mad-science division Darpa is helping build thought-controlled robotic limbs, artificial pack mules, real-life laser guns and “kill-proof” soldiers. So it comes as no surprise, really, that the agency is now getting into the flying-car business, too.

Darpa hopes its “Personal Air Vehicle Technology” project, announced yesterday, will ultimately lead to a working prototype of a military-suitable flying car — a two- or four-passenger vehicle that can “drive on roads” one minute and take off like a helicopter the next. The hybrid machine would be perfect for “urban scouting,” casualty evacuation and commando-delivery missions, the agency believes.

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Full Story At  Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Scientists led by a University of Texas geologist report that data from an unmanned NASA space probe suggests there’s much more ice on Mars than previously thought.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, according to an article in the journal Science, has identified several dirt-covered glaciers — including one that is three times longer than the city of Los Angeles and up to a half-mile thick. The glaciers may be remnants of warmer conditions on the Red Planet.

Earlier this year, another spacecraft, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, scratched below the dirt-covered plains of the planet’s North Pole to uncover a glistening slab of ice.

The latest findings, from a team of 11 scientists led by John W. Holt of the University of Texas, will appear in today’s edition of Science, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Full Story At  CNN.com

(CNN) — Things didn’t go quite according to plan for astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper during her spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Tuesday.
Astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper maneuvers by the tail of the docked space shuttle Endeavour.

Astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper maneuvers by the tail of the docked space shuttle Endeavour.

First, a grease gun inside her tool bag leaked, coating everything inside with a film of lubricant.

While she was trying to clean it up in the absence of gravity, the whole bag floated away.

Stefanyshyn-Piper and Steve Bowen were outside the space station on the scheduled six-hour spacewalk, the first of the space shuttle Endeavour’s stay at the station.

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Full Story At  msnbc.com

at Oak Ridge National Laboratory? If everyone in the world performed one mathematical calculation per second, it would take 650 years to do what this machine can do in one day.

That makes the $100 million computer, nicknamed “Jaguar” by scientists, the fastest in the world for unclassified scientific research. At more than 1 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second, it is about 55,000 times faster than your typical PC.

Only one other supercomputer is faster, and it’s devoted to classified research on nuclear weapons at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexic

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