Stress really CAN cause heart attacks, say researchers – “Getting stressed really is bad for your heart, according to new research. For years, stress has been linked to heart attacks and other heart complaints but with very little medical evidence to back it up…”

The Top 9 Airplane Tech Advances of the Last 10 Years – “The aughts capped 100 years of powered flight, pushing the technologies introduced in the 20th century to their limits. This past decade has seen the development of the biggest passenger airplanes, the fastest, most agile and stealthiest fighters, and the joy of flight brought to the amateur pilot as never before. The coming decade promises breakthroughs such as combat-ready unmanned aerial vehicles, commercial rocket planes, hypersonic jets, and more. Here’s a look back at the aviation milestones of the aughts and a glimpse of what the coming decade might hold…”

Batten down the hatches. Augmented reality is on its way – “Who wants to see poor people? Soon, technology will allow us to airbrush them out…”

Augmented Reality Façade Shows Building’s Real-Time Deets and Tweets – “Now this is a use of augmented reality I can really get behind: instead of cluttering up a building with billboards and sale signs, they’re hidden within an aesthetically pleasing QR Code design…”

United States Internet Speed Is on the Decline – “According to Akamai’s Q3 State of the Internet report, the United States’ Internet speed did not qualify for a place in the top 10 list of countries with the fastest Internet in the world, and its average overall speed has actually decreased by 2.4% year-over-year from 2008 to 2009…” See also: Broadband Speeds Increase Around the World – But Not in the U.S.

Apple Tablet and NY Times Paywall: Rumors Merge – “The New York Times hasn’t spilled the beans over the Apple tablet again, but rumors are linking the two companies once more. Reports of an upcoming paid model to be adopted by the New York Times are correlated with the mythical Apple tablet, as both are said to go public in the coming weeks…”

A Sonic Blaster So Loud, It Could Be Deadly – “All kinds of of devices have been dubbed “sonic blasters” — from the Long Range Acoustic Device super loudhailer to the piercing Banshee to the Inferno (”most unbearable, gut-wrenching noise I’ve ever heard in my life” according to Danger Room’s own Sharon Weinberger). But a new device, developed in Israel, merits the “sonic blaster” label more than most: the Thunder Generator really is a blaster, producing a series of ear-splitting explosions. Some are so loud, they could be deadly…”

Program Creates Computer-Generated Sports Stories – “Sportswriters now have new competition — in the form of a computer program called StatsMonkey. The product of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University, StatsMonkey takes the statistics from a baseball game and produces a computer-generated news story about that game…”

Haiti six days later – “Haiti remains a place of profound need, anguish, desperation and danger, with a few glimmers of hope and slowly growing capabilities to receive and distribute the international aid now flowing in. Sporadic looting, sometimes violent, was met with force by security oficials and ordinary citizens, resulting in a number of further deaths and injuries. The tenuous security situation has led to at least one temporary evacuation of a medical facility, to protect the care-givers. Despite the long time since the earthquake, at least five people were pulled from the rubble alive this weekend, including a young girl trapped inside a supermarket who was fortunately surrounded by food, and survived on fruit snacks…”

Nanoscale: Robot Arm Places Atoms and Molecules With 100% Accuracy – “Until the mid-1990s, the term “nanotechnology” referred to the goal of creating vast arrays of nanoscale assemblers to fabricate useful human-scale products from scratch in an entirely automated process and with atomic precision. Since then, the word has come to mean anything from stain-resistant pants to branches of conventional chemistry — generally anything involving nanoscale objects. But the dream of a new Industrial Revolution based on nanoscale manufacturing has not died, as demonstrated most vividly by the work of NYU professor of chemistry Dr. Nadrian Seeman…”

Physicists develop 3D metamaterial nanolens that achieves super-resolution imaging – “A research team from Northeastern University has developed a new nanolens that can beat the diffraction limit to achieve so-called super-resolution imaging, better than can be achieved by current technology. The nanolens is made from arrays of nanowires also called as metamaterials – manufactured materials not found in nature – and has superior imaging capabilities compared to current imaging technologies…”

Redflex pushes ticket-rule change for speed cameras – “The Arizona Department of Public Safety introduced the cameras in September 2008 and slowly added more until all 76 were up and running by January 2009. Supporters said the cameras slow down drivers, reduce accidents, and free up law-enforcement officers for serious criminals, while opponents argue that they are intrusive and are more about making money than safety….”

China’s Silicon Ceiling – “Google vs. China represents a clash of what may be the two most powerful forces of the first decade of the 21st century. Like China, Google has changed the terms of competition in crucial markets, thanks to its advantages in hardware, productive capacity, and engineering brainpower. The juggernaut rolls into new industries—e-mail, GPS, smartphones, operating systems for netbooks—heedless of the competition, rolling up profits and disheartening rivals…”

Only Google Could Leave China – “When Google announced Tuesday it wouldn’t censor its Google.cn search engine anymore — all but committing the “Don’t Be Evil” internet giant to a self-imposed China exile — it took just seconds for its blog post announcing the decision to careen around the world…”

Beijing’s Foreign Internet Purge – “On Tuesday, Google announced that it is considering shutting down its Chinese site and closing its China-based offices after hackers attempted to infiltrate the Gmail accounts of human rights activists. The company also said that it would no longer censor its search results in China, a virtual death sentence in China’s cyberworld…”

China’s doomed attempt to hold the world to ransom – “The Chinese government is trying to corner the rare earths market and that isn’t good news for the tech business. Those with good memories of Chemistry O Level will know what the rare earths are: the funny little line of elements from Lanthanum to Lutetium at the bottom of the periodic table, along with Yttrium and Scandium, which we usually add to the list. The reason we like them in the tech business is because they’re what enables us to make a lot of this tech stuff that is the business. You can’t run fibre optic cables without your Erbium repeaters, Europium, Terbium and Yttrium are all used to make the coloured dots in CRTs, the lens on your camera phone is 25 per cent Lanthanum oxide (yes, really, glass is made of metal oxides) and without Neodimium and Dysprosium we’d not have permanent magnets: no hard drives nor iPod headphones….”

Google at the crossroads: a review of the Nexus One – “Rumors of a Google phone have been around for years now. Even after the release of the T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream), through the various other incarnations of Android on devices from Motorola, Samsung, Acer, and a slew of other manufacturers, there continued to be talk of how this wasn’t the “real Android,” that Google itself would release a final, real, “Google Phone.” And so, on January 5th, the rumors finally came true with the launch of the Nexus One. The online, Google-hosted store through which the phone is sold is itself big news, but now Ars takes an in-depth look at how “super” this phone really is….”

Wii board helps physios strike a balance after strokes – “WHEN Ross Clark read in New Scientist (29 March 2008, p 26) that the US military considered the Nintendo Wiimote controller accurate enough to control bomb disposal robots, it set him thinking. Could the Wii’s skiing and snowboarding attachment, the balance board, help rehabilitate people who have had a stroke?”

Aircraft Carrier Purifies Water; Challenge Is Delivery – “The Carl Vinson is equipped with four distilling units which each produce 100,000 gallons of water daily, for a total of 400,000 gallons. About three-quarters of that are used in the daily operations of the ship – the rest is considered excess and can be used for relief work…”

Moscow’s stray dogs – “They also acted differently. Every so often, you would see one waiting on a metro platform. When the train pulled up, the dog would step in, scramble up to lie on a seat or sit on the floor if the carriage was crowded, and then exit a few stops later. There is even a website dedicated to the metro stray (www.metrodog.ru) on which passengers post photos and video clips taken with their mobile phones, documenting the ­savviest of the pack using the public transport system like any other Muscovite…”

Prioritising life – “Fewer deaths occurred in Hiroshima in August 1945 than in Port-au-Prince last week and more people will die there soon than in Rwanda in 1994. Yet the modern global world was unprepared for it, so busy were they with Terrorism, which has killed fewer people in the last thirty years than quarrelsome Americans with handguns in the last eight months…”

Number of crayon colors

Emotional Training Helps Kids Fight Depression – “Studies show that the habit of reacting negatively can lead to depressive thinking. “There’s a lot of evidence that pessimistic thinking undercuts achievement and well-being,” Gilham says…”

Aokigahara-forest of suicides – “Now here would be the place to go for a bet. Spend a night in the suicide forest to win. “The perfect place to die.” That’s how Aokigahara was described in Wataru Tsurumui’s bestselling book The Complete Manual of Suicide. A dense, dark forest bordering Mt. Fuji, Aokigahara is infamous throughout Japan as a popular spot for those taking their final journey…”

Pumping autistic children full of an industrial chelator – “The double standard of the anti-vaccine “autism biomed” movement never ceases to amaze me…”

Light fantastic: World’s oldest lightbulb still burning bright after 109 years – “The world’s oldest light bulb has been burning for 109 years – so little wonder it has a fan club with thousands of members and its own website…”

Pretty women ‘anger more easily’ – “Researchers found women who rated themselves as pretty displayed a war-like streak when fighting battles to get their own way. The University of California interviewed 156 female students to gauge their temperament and how they handled conflict…”

Explained: The Shannon limit – “It’s the early 1980s, and you’re an equipment manufacturer for the fledgling personal-computer market. For years, modems that send data over the telephone lines have been stuck at a maximum rate of 9.6 kilobits per second: if you try to increase the rate, an intolerable number of errors creeps into the data…”

Did a thirst for beer spark civilization? – “Drunkenness, hangovers, and debauchery tend to come to mind when one thinks about alcohol and its effects. But could alcohol also have been a catalyst for human civilization? “

MIT: Unusual snail shell could be a model for better armor – “New insights about a tiny snail that lives on the ocean floor could help scientists design better armor for soldiers and vehicles, according to MIT researchers…”

Fish May Not Have Evolved Gills to Breathe – “Why did fish evolve gills? If you said, “To breathe,” then you probably passed Biology 101. But you–and the textbooks–may not be right. A new study argues that the structures really emerged to help keep fish in chemical balance with their environment…”

Study: Daily vitamin D, calcium reduces fractures – “According to international research involving almost 70,000 people, the daily use of vitamin D and calcium was showed to reduce the risk from hip fractures, vertebral fractures—in fact, all types of bone fractures in all ages of men and women…”

Major Earthquake Due to Hit Southern California, Study Says – “About 300 years of pent-up stress in southern California is sufficient to trigger a catastrophic earthquake on the San Andreas Fault system, according to a new study…”

Infographic: Mega Shark

GM Corn & Organ Failure: Lots of Sensationalism, Few Facts – “On Wednesday, we covered the overreaction by a few important online sources to an International Journal of Biological Sciences article claiming to find “signs of toxicity” in three varieties of genetically modified (GM) corn produced by Monsanto. We posted some caveats that made us uneasy about the study, such as the funding sources, the unknown quality of the journal, and the fact that the toxicity claims rely on reinterpreting statistical data that Gilles-Eric Séralini and his coauthors themselves note is not as robust as it needs to be…”

UN climate report: Scientist warned glacier forecast was wrong – “A top scientist said Monday he had warned in 2006 that a prediction of catastrophic loss of Himalayan glaciers, published months later by the UN’s Nobel-winning climate panel, was badly wrong…”

How Thick Is the Earth’s Crust? – “We present a new contour map of the thickness of the Earth’s crust. We use a 10 km contour interval plus the 45 km contour. This contour map was created directly from the 5 deg. by 5 deg. gridded crustal model CRUST 5.1…”

Earth’s Hottest Day: 1-16-2010 – “I just ran across a climate dataset I had never seen before: the daily global temperature reading, as deduced from earth-orbiting satellites…”

A tale of two qubits: how quantum computers work – “Quantum information is the physics of knowledge. To be more specific, the field of quantum information studies the implications that quantum mechanics has on the fundamental nature of information. By studying this relationship between quantum theory and information, it is possible to design a new type of computer—a quantum computer. A largescale, working quantum computer—the kind of quantum computer some scientists think we might see in 50 years—would be capable of performing some tasks impossibly quickly…”

35,000-Core Ubuntu Server Farm Renders Avatar – “According to Paul, Ubuntu is at the core of all of this, running on all of the rendering nodes, and 90% of the desktops at Weta Digital. He notes that his farm (he calls it a “render wall”) is in fact an Ubuntu Server farm, and not RHEL as he has seen reported in the media…”

17 Ways Consumers Are Changing – “Are shoppers beaten down? Will thrifty spending endure? Or will the irrepressible American consumer come roaring back stronger than ever? Nobody’s quite sure, but here are 17 ways consumers seem to be changing, based on economic data, market-research studies and dozens of reports from customers themselves…”

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