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POPSWhy your Car's Sat Nav Doesn't Like The Sun Presenting their findings at a conference on space weather in Washington DC, they said the solar burst was also strong enough to affect civil aviation navigation systems, but to a lesser degree than the GPS network, which uses a different satellite system. It may explain why systems unexpectedly lose the signal when they had perfect reception only moments before. There have been some incidents where drivers following their systems have caused accidents by taking a wrong turning or attempting to programme the device while driving.
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POPSPacifier For Smarter Babie's?
I think that each parent have the responsibility for their kids health and this includes what they want to teach them, but as parents they have to know what is going on around with all this information that captures their thoughts. For example, evidence of playing a Mozart CD or sitting the baby down in front of Baby Einstein DVD to have smarter babies. "That a baby's first three years are key for brain development is beyond dispute; scientists know that babies' brains change rapidly, growing and pruning synapses.But Mead says a few early childhood advocates have misinterpreted or misused research to suggest that if parents don't sufficiently stimulate children's brains before age 3, they'll do irreparable harm. There is no evidence that the first three years "are a singular window for growth that slams shut once children turn 3," Mead says." But there's no evidence that playing your baby a Mozart CD or sitting her down in front of a Baby Einstein DVD makes a difference, he say
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POPSAeolus, The Greek God Of Wind An Aeolian harp is a wind harp; one of a unique variety of wind instruments played by nature and not by the hand of man, not unlike wind chimes or a wind sculpture. A regular stringed instrument will make a sound in the breeze if properly positioned, the wind moving through the strings and causing them to vibrate and eventually work harmonically on each other, producing the sound. These unique wind harps produce a sound much subtler than that of a wind chime, often referred to as enchanting, ethereal, and almost haunting. Some say the best time of day to hear these yard art harps is after dark, when background noises are at minimum. The seem to work best in a gentle 8-12 mph breeze.
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POPSDesperation Of Mad Scientists About Global Warming Other ideas under consideration include constructing a sun shield made up of hundreds of thousands of reflectors or building a sulfur-spewing volcano to reflect the sun’s rays, preventing them from reaching the earth. These ideas haven’t been fully formulated Many fear there will be unintended side effects; others worry such schemes might prevent the type of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are the only real way to fight global warming. These approaches are not an alternative to cutting pollution, said University of Calgary professor David Keith, a top geoengineering researcher. These solutions aren't cheap or easy, but they could help hold off warming even if we do manage to cut emissions.
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POPSSmall asteroid risk is higher than estimated The chairman of this week's Planetary Defense Conference, William Ailor of the Aerospace Corp., a nonprofit established by Congress to support the Air Force's space defense program, said scientists generally agree that the risk to Earth from large asteroids is small. Researchers have identified more than 700 of these potential "planet killers" -- out of an estimated 1,000 -- and found that not one is on a collision course with Earth. "But with the smaller ones, the asteroids in the range, we're finding more and more," Ailor said yesterday. "They're hard to detect, and it's hard to predict where they are headed, but they can do a great deal of damage." NASA estimates that there are as many as 100,000 of the smaller asteroids in near-Earth orbit and that about 20 are "potentially hazardous."
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POPSThe Secret Language of Whales The scientists used acoustic recordings to delineate nine population regions worldwide. They found the whales weren't evenly distributed, though: Populations using a "Type 1" call, for example, live within a narrow band of ocean hugging the North American coast, while whales that use a "Type 4" call are spread over a large swath of the Northern Pacific Ocean.The scientists say the dialect findings could help guide conservation efforts for blue whales, whose numbers dwindled to dangerously low levels before whaling moratoria were enacted: There were once an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 in the Southern Hemisphere, but today that number is closer to 1,000, Scripps scientist John Hildebrand told LiveScience. "By listening to the animals," he said, "you can tell something about the areas in which they are interacting to breed and that's important to know for managing and conserving the animals."
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POPSAsteroids Get A Kick Out Of Sunlight An artist's concept of a massive asteroid belt in orbit around a star the same age and size as our Sun. Research indicates that sunlight speeds up an asteroid's spin and changes the direction of its axis.
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POPSInside Your Mind American scientist John Donoghue is masterminding a brain implant called Brain Gate. For the first time, it allows people to move physical objects by thought alone.
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POPSBiological Gold Mine Sheila Souza, a scientist at Brazil's National School of Public Health, told Discovery News that she and colleague Veronica Wesolowski have also been recovering particulate matter from ancient teeth. "It is really new to try the washing technique proposed by the researchers," Souza said, adding that the new dental wash technique is "interesting," but problematic for the reasons the inventors cited themselves. Souza agreed that it is important to analyze ancient teeth, however, particularly in Brazil, where early plant evidence has been sparse in some areas. "We are really opening a big, new field to improve prehistoric reconstructions about the Sambaquis diet and lifestyle with calculus and microfossils," she said.
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POPSHuge Polar Study About To Begin Ahead of the IPY's launch, a team of researchers on the CAML project completed a 10-week census of marine life in a near-pristine strech of Antarctic seabed. "What we learned from the...expedition is the tip of an iceberg, so to speak," said team leader Michael Stoddart.
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POPSStudy:Alien Worlds Have Dry Atmospheres Scientists have found 213 planets outside our solar system, but only 14 have orbits that make it possible for this type of study; only eight or nine of those are close enough to see. Grillmair's team studied the closest, which goes by the catch name HD 189733b. But for the question: Where did water go?: Maybe it's hiding, scientists suggest. The water could be under dust clouds, or all the airborne water molecules have the same temperature, making it impossible to see using an infrared spectrograph. Or maybe it is just not there and astronomers have to go back to the drawing board when it comes to these alien planets. The other finding on the more distant of the two planets seems to indicate that the atmosphere is full of silicon-oxygen compounds, said study lead author L. Jeremy Richardson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
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POPSPshsicists Dream Of Next Big Particle Smasher "We're in the middle of a particle physics revolution," Richter said. "The next 10 to 15 years will answr many questions and raise new ones," Richter said. "Regrettably, the experiments are bigger and more expensive...so finance will limit the pace of discovery." Richter said the International Linear Collider could be operational in 2012, provided it won enough international support.
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POPSMore Evidence For Water On Mars What I can't understand is that: Two craters in the southern hemisphere that were originally photographed in 1999 and 2001 were examined again in 2004 and 2005, and the images yielded changes consistent with water flowing down the crater walls, according to the study...
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POPSBeing Bilingual Can Delay Onset Of Dementia The Alzheimer Society of Canada described the report as exciting and said it confirmed recent studies that showed that keeping the brain active was a good way to delay the impact of dementia. Is this good or what?
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POPSScientists Becoming Mind-Readers The question is: How a person has decided to act in the future? The understanding could find use in mind-reading methods under development to enable tetraplegic to move prosthetic limbs and operate computers.