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Making water move without gravity
 Sprinkle
water droplets on a flat surface and often they'll slowly trickle in different
directions. Now engineers have figured out how to force droplets to zip along
at amazingly fast speeds, a discovery that could help industries from heating
to microelectronics. The results appear in Friday's Science.
Researchers find a cooperative volcano
 Studying
volcanoes can often be like studying tigers in the wild without the benefit
of tranquilizer guns. Active volcanoes can be inaccessible, temperamental, and
dangerous. Mount Erebus, which dominates the landscape around the U.S. McMurdo
Station in Antarctica, is an exception. While from time to time it's been known
to throw out a "bomb" the size of a refrigerator, most of the time
it's quietly erupting, allowing scientists to get close.
Accident kills controversial archaeologist
 Richard
"Scotty" MacNeish, who often stirred controversy with his archaeological theories
or claims, but who was also highly respected, has died after an automobile accident
this week in Belize. MacNeish, who was 82, enjoyed a career in archaeology that
spanned more than six decades and most of the globe.
Fingerprints: The new ticket to lunch
Forget the cash, credit cards or ticket at school lunchtime.
Food Service Solutions of Altoona, Pa., is testing a computer program that reads
a student's fingerprint, then deducts the cost of a meal from a pre-established
account. The system makes lunch-line bullies a thing of the past, eliminates
lost lunch cards and speeds up cafeteria lines, says company President Mitch
Johns. Johns says the system doesn't make a complete fingerprint image, like
that used by law enforcement, so privacy is not a concern.
There's more to Egypt than the pyramids
 Most
of the thousands of tourists who visit Egypt each year go to see the antiquities
from the times of the pharaohs such as the pyramids. But Egypt has other antiquities
worth seeing, writes Robert Partridge of Egypt Revealed magazine. Cairo, for
instance has the world's largest collection of Islamic monuments.
Rats relive their work in their dreams
Do rats dream about who stole their cheese? Yes, indeed,
says researchers behind an experiment that not only finds that animals dream,
but also helps deduce what they dream about. The study, reported Thursday in
the journal Neuron, looked at the dream life of four rats with brains wired
to recover their most subtle brainwaves. During the day, the researchers ran
the rats through a maze, recording waves of brain-cell activity as the rodents
learned their way around. At night, they recorded some 40 episodes of so-called
rapid-eye-movement, or REM, sleep, during which the rats' brain activities exactly
mirrored the brainwaves shown during daytime maze runs. "We can even tell
when they're slowing down or speeding up," say neuroscientist Matthew Wilson
of MIT's Center for Learning and Memory.
Mir is coming down, its legacy remains in orbit
When Mir vaporizes over the Pacific Ocean east of Australia
in early March, it will be mourned by space experts and those who lived on the
spacecraft. Mir, which has survived through fire, revolution and financial catastrophe,
was launched Feb. 20, 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev was the leader of a nation still
called the Soviet Union and its planned life expectancy was 4 to 5 years. The
Mir lasted much longer than expected and its cosmonauts set one record after
another for longest continuous time in space.
Answers to your science questions
 This
week USATODAY.com WonderQuest
looks at tiny transistors, rabbit teeth and the tides. April Holladay, a science
journalist, is posting new questions and the answers about topics ranging from
anthropology to zoology each Wednesday.
In addition, Jack Williams, the USATODAY.com Weather Editor,
and the USATODAY.com Weather Team answer
questions about weather and climate.
Rejuvenated study will tackle Pacific storm problem
Scientists using a hurricane-hunter plane and other high-tech
instruments began a new study Tuesday to give U.S. West Coast residents better
warning of vicious Pacific storms that strike each winter. Goals of the Pacific
Landfalling Jets Experiment including improving rainfall and wind forecasts,
up to a day in advance, in California, Oregon and Washington. The experiment,
which runs through March 4, builds upon West Coast research conducted in the
California Land-Falling Jets Experiment during the strong El Niņo of 1997-98.
'Disaster is not a sure result of warming
An international panel's report on climate change that
came out Sunday night gives a range of what could happen over the next 100 years,
ranging from fairly benign changes to ones that could be disastrous. Either,
plus the many in the middle, have the same odds of happening. Focusing on the
disaster end of the range misses the report's point, scientists say.
Danger of Seattle tsunami not just science fiction
It sounds like something from a bad disaster miniseries:
A major earthquake occurs on a fault near Seattle, creating a tsunami in Puget
Sound that sends a 20-foot wall of water heading into the city at the speed
of a jetliner. It's not a miniseries plot, but something that could happen one
of these days and that scientists and emergency management experts are discussing
at a workshop.
Where the tiny springtail is king
In most parts of the world, creatures such as the lion
are the top land predator; hence "king of the jungle." Those who work
in the polar regions like to joke that the tiny springtail — about the
size of a grain of rice — is the "lion of Antarctica" because
it's the biggest land animal native to The Ice. Penguins and other birds,along
with seals, don't count because they make their living by feeding off of sea
life. A story from the Antarctic Sun tells what scientists are learning about
springtails.
Physicists put the brakes on light
Physicists say they have brought light particles to a screeching
halt, then revved them up again so that they could continue their journey at
a blistering 186,000 miles per second. The results will be published in upcoming
issues of the journals Nature and Physical Review Letters. Physicists
who did not participate in the experiments said the two research papers make
an important contribution to understanding the properties of light. Eventually,
researchers hope to harness its speedy properties in the development of more
powerful computers and other technologies that store information in light particles
rather than electrons.
Space robots will help out astronauts
 As
humans spend more and more time exploring space, there will be an increasing
need to perform increasingly difficult task and repairs. To help the astronauts,
NASA is developing robots that will have more human-like features, including
hands with five fingers. These robots, powered by powerful computer chips, will
be controlled by remotely by the astronauts using specialized gloves and helmets
that mimic human movement.
USATODAY.com
brief reviews of science, weather books
Latest
space news from Florida Today Space Online
Science
publications on the Web
National Research Council:
Beyond Discovery Series of reports
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