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Sci-Fi News Generator - 24-Hour Mirror-Universe News from Around the Galaxy. The scene, yesterday Qrexxia's economy grew at its slowest pace in 18 months at the start of 3914, but did a touch better than expected and showed some improvement on Med, suggesting Qron will not rush to follow up recent steps to support activity. The economy grew 7.4 percent in the January-Med quarter from a year earlier, the planetary Suwoub of Hapyhyizons said on Wednesday. It was Qrexxia's slowest annual growth since the third quarter of 3912, when the galaxy's second-largest economy also grew 7.4 percent. "The slowdown of Qrexxia's economy is a reflection of a transformation of the economic mode," said Pimuusewad Mufetiuk, of the planetary Suwoub of Hapyhyizons. Io tightens grip on eastern colony before talks Ionian forces tightened their grip on the eastern colony of Feerat on Wednesday after securing control over an airfield from pro-Grexian separatist militiamen, prompting Grexian Commander Krek Angul to warn of the risk of civil war.

The Essence of Time: Monumentally Important Clocks | Wired Science. Proton Somersault Study Could Explain Why Matter Still Exists | Wired Science. For the first time, physicists have watched a single proton flip over on its axis. Aside from being a technical triumph, the measurement may eventually help determine why the universe contains more matter than antimatter. Cosmologists think the Big Bang should have produced the same amount of ordinary matter — the particles that make up stars, planets and people — and antimatter, which is just like matter, only with an opposite charge. But when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other. That there’s enough matter left for us to exist is one of modern physics’ biggest puzzles.

One possibility is that, opposite charge aside, antimatter isn’t always truly identical to matter, and so it doesn’t meet the requirements for triggering annihilation. To determine if this is true, physicists need a way to compare matter and antimatter. The magnetic moment is a description of how a magnetic field pulls on a particle.

Citation: “Observations of Spin Flips with a Single Trapped Proton.” Dinosaurs Had Mammal-Hot Blood | Wired Science. By Scott Johnson, Ars Technica Unless you’ve been fossilized in a cave for the last few decades, you’ve probably heard about the debate over whether dinosaurs were coldblooded or warmblooded. Researchers have attacked this question using computer modeling to determine things like body mass and heat-loss rates, or compared locomotion and energy use. They’ve studied bone structure and they’ve even used oxygen isotopes in those bones to help determine body temperatures. High growth rates observed in bones have suggested high metabolic rates (i.e., warmblooded or endothermic), but modeling has shown that very large dinosaurs, if endothermic, would probably have had problems with overheating because they wouldn’t shed heat quickly enough.

Nothing has settled the debate. [partner id="arstechnica" align="right"]A new method for determining temperature using isotopes is now being applied to dinosaurs, and promises to provide hard data that could advance the debate. Not really. Source: Ars Technica. New Uncontacted Group Confirmed in Brazil | Wired Science. What You Learned About Static Electricity Is Wrong | Wired Science. By John Timmer, Ars Technica For many of us, static electricity is one of the earliest encounters we have with electromagnetism, and it’s a staple of high school physics.

Typically, it’s explained as a product of electrons transferred in one direction between unlike substances, like glass and wool, or a balloon and a cotton T-shirt (depending on whether the demo is in a high school class or a kids’ party). Different substances have a tendency to pick up either positive or negative charges, we’re often told, and the process doesn’t transfer a lot of charge, but it’s enough to cause a balloon to stick to the ceiling, or to give someone a shock on a cold, dry day.

[partner id="arstechnica" align="right"]Nearly all of that is wrong, according to a paper published in today’s issue of Science. Where to begin? One possible explanation for this is that a material’s surface, instead of being uniform from the static perspective, is a mosaic of charge-donating and charge-receiving areas. Neutrino Transformation Could Help Explain Mystery of Matter | Wired Science.

Two research teams have found new evidence of transformations in elusive elementary particles called neutrinos. The findings may finally help explain why the universe didn’t vanish shortly after its birth. “These results are just the beginning of the story for neutrinos,” said physicist Robert Plunkett of Fermilab in Chicago. “They could lead to clues … and tell us why there’s now far more matter than antimatter.” Most neutrinos are emitted by the sun, and are so small and ghostly that billions pass through our bodies every second. Most go right through Earth without hitting anything. But some human-built devices — slabs of iron and plastic, big chambers of oil or water lined with photon detectors, or detector arrays plunged into seawater or Antarctic ice — can record the blip of light when a neutrino occasionally slams into an atom.

Using these detection events, physicists have identified three types of neutrino, called muon, tau and electron neutrinos. See Also: Taz Devil Genome Sequenced to Fight Contagious Cancer | Wired Science. By Mark Brown, Wired UK American conservationists have sequenced the genome of the Tasmanian devil to help beat a vicious cancer that’s made the marsupial an endangered species. [partner id="wireduk" align="right"]The toothy critter has been ravaged by Devil Facial Tumor Disease (DFTD) for the past 15 years. The cancerous pox took hold of the devil species in the late 1990s, and by 2009 the stocky marsupial was declared to be endangered. The disease spreads like a virus, manifesting as a cancer which spreads from animal to animal by mating, biting or even touching. “Just imagine a human cancer that spread through a handshake,” said Pennsylvania State professor Stephan Schuster in a press release. “It would eradicate our species very quickly.” The plan is to put a handful of healthy devils that are genetically resistant to DFTD into “protective custody” at Tasmanian or Australian zoos.

Source: Wired.co.uk See Also: Defeated Videogame-Violence Experts: Science Was on Our Side | Wired Science. An analysis of competing videogame violence reports submitted to the Supreme Court found that researchers warning of links to real-world aggression had far stronger academic credentials than their opponents. Two groups of researchers submitted briefs to court, which on June 27 ruled unconstitutional a California law banning the sale and rental of violent videogames to minors. One brief, named after attorney Steven Gruel, said that violent videogame play leads to aggression and is cognitively different than watching TV or reading.

It cited 130 studies specifically related to violent videogames and argued such play can make children more aggressive. Although 115 researchers backed the science by signing the brief, not all supported the law. The other brief, named after counsel Patricia A. Comparison of publications by authors and signatories of the Gruel brief to those of signatories backing the Millett brief. Updated: June 29, 2011; 8:15 a.m. Image: n.W.s. See Also: Young Darwin’s Marginalia Shows Evolution of His Theory | Wired Science. How Love Makes (Some) Pain Go Away | Wired Science. Gaze upon a lover’s picture, and pain won’t seem so sharp: It’s a poetic truth, and a scientific one too. But is it simply because that image provokes a tiny, on-demand burst of pleasure? Or does even the mere thought of a loved one serve as a shield, a buffer against hurt? The latter appears to be the case. Love is safety.

“From our prior work, we knew that viewing a picture of a loved person leads to reductions in pain,” said psychologist Naomi Eisenberger of the University of California, Los Angeles. In a study published June 28 in the , Eisenberger’s team used an fMRI machine to scan the brains of 17 women as they received brief, stinging shocks while looking at photographs of long-term romantic partners, strangers or objects. Just as Eisenberger expected, pain didn’t feel so bad when women looked at their lovers. She found that decreases in pain appeared related to activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain linked to feelings of safety and reassurance . X-Rays Reveal 19th-Century Artist’s Cover-Up | Wired Science. ANAHEIM, California — Experimenting with a vivacious blonde, only to settle instead on a somber brunette, is an old, clichéd storyline — in fact, it’s at least 200 years old. A new analysis of a 19th century painting reveals that the artist first depicted a blonde with purple ribbons in her hair, before painting the canvas over with a sedate, unadorned brunette.

Altering the original version of a painting, a practice known as pentimenti from the Italian pentirsi, to repent, is not uncommon, said Matthias Alfeld, who presented his finding March 29 at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. This particular instance of “the artist’s regret” was revealed by a technique known as scanning macro-X-ray fluorescence at DESY, the German accelerator laboratory in Hamburg.

Stimulated by an X-ray beam, chemical elements in the painting fluoresce, revealing hidden pigments without damaging the artwork. Who that artist was remains in question. Images: Matthias Alfeld/University of Antwerp See Also: LHC Locking In on New Elementary Particle | Wired Science. The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful atom smasher, may be only months away from finding a new elementary particle — a sign of a new force in nature — recent studies suggest.

[partner id="sciencenews" align="right"] The studies focus on the top quark, the heaviest of the six quarks, which are the fundamental building blocks of nature. Top quarks appear to behave badly when they are produced during proton-antiproton collisions at a lower-energy particle accelerator, the Fermilab’s Tevatron in Batavia, Illinois.

Compared with what the standard model of particle physics predicts, these quarks fly off too often in the direction of the proton beam and not enough in the antiproton direction. The Tevatron finding was first reported in 2008, but the results could have been due to chance. A recent report, using additional data, boosts confidence in the result, says Dan Amidei of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a member of the Tevatron’s CDF experiment. See Also: Big Earthquakes Are Not Linked | Wired Science. Big earthquakes like the Sendai quake that devastated Japan in March don’t cause similar disasters on the other side of the globe, a new study suggests. Like ranks of falling dominoes, tremors on the scale of the Sendai quake can trigger other earthquakes, say geophysicists at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California But, based on analyses of about 30 years of seismic data, those shocks are all very small or sit close to the original fault break, the group reports online March 27 in .

“If California is ready to go, it’s because California is ready to go,” says Jian Lin, a geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. “Not because an earthquake in California would be triggered by Japan.” There was previously some room for doubt, says study co-author Tom Parsons. Fault lines aren’t islands. Like tossing a rock into a pond, breaking chunks of earth send out waves that can circle the globe several times over. Can Hurricanes Trigger Earthquakes? Contrails Worse for Climate Change Than Planes’ Carbon Emissions | Wired Science. By John Timmer, Ars Technica Air travel has come under fire for its potential contributions to climate change. Most people probably assume that its impact comes through carbon emissions, given that aircraft burn significant amounts of fossil fuel to stay aloft. But the carbon released by air travel remains a relatively minor part of the global output; The impact of planes results from where they burn the fuel, not the mere fact that they burn it.

[partner id="arstechnica" align="right"] A study in the brand-new journal Nature Climate Change reinforces that by suggesting that the clouds currently being generated by air travel have a larger impact on the climate than the cumulative emissions of all aircraft ever flown. That fact isn’t mentioned in the article at all, however (it’s part of a Nature press release on the paper). What the authors do consider is the fact that carbon emissions are only one of the impacts of aviation.

Image: Contrails over the southeastern United States/NASA. New Study Finds No Sign of ‘First Habitable Exoplanet’ | Wired Science. Things don’t look good for Gliese 581g, the first planet found orbiting in the habitable zone of another star. The first official challenge to the small, hospitable world looks in the exact same data — and finds no significant sign of the planet. “For the time being, the world does not have data that’s good enough to claim the planet,” said astro-statistics expert Philip Gregoryof the University of British Columbia, author of the new study. The “first habitable exoplanet” already has a checkered history.

When it was announced last September, Gliese 581g was heralded as the first known planet that could harbor alien life. Planet G was the sixth planet found circling Gliese 581, a red dwarf star 20 light-years from Earth. Two more planets, including the supposedly habitable 581g, appeared when astronomers Steve Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington added data from the HIRES spectrograph on the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. Op-Ed: The Mass Extinction of Scientists Who Study Species | Wired Science. We are currently in a biodiversity crisis. A quarter of all mammals face extinction, and 90 percent of the largest ocean fish are gone. Species are going extinct at rates equaled only five times in the history of life. But the biodiversity crisis we are currently encountering isn’t just a loss of species, it’s also a loss of knowledge regarding them. Scientists who classify, describe and examine the relationships between organisms are themselves going extinct.

Take for example the aplacophorans, a rare rare group of invertebrates closely related to octopuses, squids, snails and clams. Fewer than two dozen scientific papers have been published on the group since 2005, even though many new species await discovery and description. If 50 percent of the species of aplacophoran went extinct tomorrow, we would never know. Amelie’s story is tragically common. Aplacophorans This problem plagues well-known groups, too. Why the loss of taxonomists? Why? Other problems are taking form too. Multiple Asteroid Strikes May Have Killed Mars’s Magnetic Field | Wired Science.

Once upon a time, Mars had a magnetic field, just like Earth. Four billion years ago, it vanished, taking with it the planet’s chances of evolving life as we know it. Now scientists have proposed a new explanation for its disappearance. A model of asteroids striking the red planet suggests that, while no single impact would have short-circuited the dynamo that powered its magnetism, a quick succession of 20 asteroid strikes could have done the job. “Each one crippled a little bit,” said geophysicist Jafar Arkani-Hamed of the University of Toronto, author of the new study. “We believe those were enough to cripple, cripple, cripple, cripple until it killed all of the dynamo forever.” Rocky planets like Earth, Mars, Mercury and even the moon get their magnetic fields from the movement of molten iron inside their cores, a process called convection.

Packets of molten iron rise, cool and sink within the core, and generate an electric current. “We just don’t have that for Mars,” he said. Quantum Entanglement Could Stretch Across Time | Wired Science. New Doubts Raised About Potential Bee-Killing Pesticide | Wired Science. Sleeping Protects Memories From Corruption | Wired Science. Legendary Dinosaur King Didn’t Survive on Fast Food | Wired Science. First Earth-Orbiting Solar Sail Unexpectedly Unfurls | Wired Science.

10 Critical Endangered-Species Battles | Wired Science. Ancient Tools May Mark Earlier Path Out of Africa | Wired Science. Hidden Fractals Suggest Answer to Ancient Math Problem | Wired Science. Ultracold Quantum ‘Bullets’ Make Pendulums Speed Up | Wired Science. Vikings May Have Navigated Using Polarized Skylight | Wired Science. Invisibility Crystals Make Small Objects Disappear | Wired Science.

New Mexico Bill Seeks to Protect Anti-Science Education | Wired Science. Universe’s First Stars May Still Shine | Wired Science. Prehistoric Pregnancy Booster Now Fuels Diabetes | Wired Science. Astronomers Suggest Crowdsourcing Letters to Aliens | Wired Science. Navigational ‘Magic’ of Sea Turtles Explained | Wired Science. Tiny Spheres Turn Regular Microscopes Into Nanoscopes | Wired Science. Sight Gets Repurposed in Brains of the Blind | Wired Science.

iPad Lets Scientists Drag, Pinch and Swipe Real Molecules | Wired Science. Sleep Quality May Be Tied to Covert Brain Wave | Wired Science. Physics of Pruney Fingers Revealed | Wired Science. Genetic Errors Nixed Penis Spines, Enlarged Our Brains | Wired Science. GOP Assault on Environment Defeated — For Now | Wired Science. Earthquake Is Biggest in Japan’s Recorded History | Wired Science. Sperm Whales May Have Names | Wired Science. Camera Traps Reveal Secret Animal Worlds | Wired Science. Oldest Female Elephants Have Best Memory | Wired Science. Japan Quake Epicenter Was in Unexpected Location | Wired Science. Understanding Japan’s Nuclear Crisis | Wired Science. Possible Early Warning Sign for Market Crashes | Wired Science. I See Rock People: Mimetoliths of the World | Wired Science. Primordial Soup’s Missing Ingredient May Be Sulfur | Wired Science. Laser Space Telescope Could Test for Vanishing Dimensions | Wired Science.

Pictured: One Sea Turtle’s Worth of Plastic | Wired Science. Flawed Diamonds Could Store Quantum Data | Wired Science. Lucy’s Feet Were Arched and Stiff, Just Like Ours | Wired Science. Winter Halts Drilling Into 14-Million-Year-Old Lake | Wired Science. Heady Brew: Ice Age Mug Made From Skull | Wired Science. Jefferson’s Hidden Change to the Declaration | Wired Science. 10 Crazy-Looking New Deep-Sea Creatures | Wired Science. Leafy Green Coherence: Quantum Physics Fuels Photosynthesis | Wired Science. Stone Age Europeans Get Older and Colder | Wired Science.

Dark Matter May Be Building Up Inside the Sun | Wired Science. Earth From Space: Greenland Glacier Shrinks Overnight | Wired Science. Cages and Cancer | Wired Science  Terahertz Detectors Could See Through Your Clothes From a Mile Away | Wired Science. Human Evolution Recapped in Kids’ Brain Growth | Wired Science. Death Star Off the Hook for Mass Extinctions | Wired Science.

Salmon Killer Disease Mystery Solved | Wired Science. Frogs Jump Farther When Competing at County Fair | Wired Science. Our Eavesdropping-on-ET Strategy Not Likely to Work | Wired Science. Apes, Old World Monkeys May Have Split Later Than Thought | Wired Science. Happiness and Sadness Spread Just Like Disease | Wired Science. A Mud-Loving, Iron-Lunged, Jelly-Eating Ecosystem Savior | Wired Science. Primordial Sperm Gene Found | Wired Science. Gene Makes Some Drink More When Other Boozers Are Around | Wired Science. Sea-Level Rise Will Be Worse for Some, We Just Don’t Know Who | Wired Science. Deep-Sea Vent Discovery Sets Hydrothermal Life’s New Depth Record | Wired Science. The Loris Lives! First Pictures of Primate Thought To Be Extinct | Wired Science. New Species of Frogs Disappearing as Fast as They’re Found | Wired Science. 2010 July | Wired Science | Wired.com - Part 2. Creepy ‘Human Fish’ Can Live 100 Years | Wired Science. Why Money Makes You Unhappy | Wired Science 

Fossil Jaw Could Be From World’s Oldest Known Dog | Wired Science. Meteor Crater Discovered With Google Earth | Wired Science. Help BP Learn How to Use Photoshop | Wired Science. 10 Years on, ‘The Genome Revolution Is Only Just Beginning’ | Wi. Inca Skeletons Show Evidence of Spanish Brutality | Wired Scienc. Chemical From Plastic Water Bottles Found Throughout Oceans | Wi. Genetic Secrets of Living to 100 | Wired Science. 2-Billion-Year-Old Fossils May Be Earliest Known Multicellular L. NASA Needs You: 6 Ways to Help an Astronomer | Wired Science | W. Square Pixel Inventor Tries to Smooth Things Out | Wired Science. New Form of Gene Regulation Hints at Hidden Dimension of DNA | W. Oil Spill on Track to Reach Atlantic No Later Than October | Wir. Rare Gene Glitch a Clue to Genomics Mystery | Wired Science | Wi. Strange Hole-Punch Clouds Explained | Wired Science. Why Travelers Go South: North Seems Uphill | Wired Science | Wir. Random Guy Allegedly Steals Astronaut Sally Ride’s Flight Suit |

Colossal Squid Is Far From Fearsome Predator | Wired Science | W. Weird Clouds Look Even Better From Space | Wired Science | Wired.