An international team of astronomers, led by Professor Svetlana Berdyugina of ETH Zurich’s Institute of Astronomy, has for the first time ever been able to detect and monitor the visible light that is scattered in the atmosphere of an exoplanet.

Employing techniques similar to how Polaroid sunglasses filter away reflected sunlight to reduce glare, the team of scientists were able to extract polarized light to enhance the faint reflected starlight ‘glare’ from an exoplanet. As a result, the scientists could infer the size of its swollen atmosphere. They also directly traced the orbit of the planet, a feat of visualization not possible using indirect methods.

Someone named Scylla waterboarded himself and provided a detailed account of what happened. “Old” self-experimentation, you could say, was doctors doing dangerous things to themselves for a short time to prove some idea that they already believed (e.g., a dentist using laughing gas as an anesthetic); “new” self-experimentation is me doing something perfectly safe for a long time to solve a problem that I have no clue how to solve. What Scylla did is between the two. Short duration, not completely safe, done to find out if waterboarding is torture or not. Scylla had no strong opinion about this when he started.

SAN MATEO, California, December 26 /PRNewswire/ --

NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N) announced today that it has closed on its initial public offering of 6,200,000 shares of common stock at a price of US$26.00 per share. NetSuite also announced that the underwriters of the offering exercised in full their option to purchase an additional 930,000 shares of the company's common stock (565,000 shares from the company and 365,000 shares from the selling stockholders), bringing the total initial public offering size to US$185.4 million prior to the deduction of underwriting discounts and estimated expenses paid by NetSuite.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20021024/SFTH024LOGO)

CHICAGO, December 26 /PRNewswire/ --

- World's Largest Conferencing Provider Plans to Extend Industry Leadership in Collaboration Services

InterCall, the world's largest conferencing provider and a leader in collaboration services, has announced the leadership team for the forthcoming launch of its Unified Communications offering. Three industry veterans have been brought together to develop and bring to market the next generation of enterprise collaboration services.

A genetic mutation already known to be more common in Ashkenazi Jewish breast cancer patients is also prevalent in Hispanic and young African-American women with breast cancer, according to one of the largest, multiracial studies of the mutation to date.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Northern California Cancer Center reported the finding from a study of 3,181 breast cancer patients in Northern California. It revealed that although Ashkenazi Jewish women with breast cancer had the highest rate of the BRCA1 mutation at 8.3 percent, Hispanic women with breast cancer were next most likely, with a rate of 3.5 percent.

People with clinical addictions know first-hand the ravages the disease can take on almost every aspect of their lives. So why do they continue addictive behaviors, even after a period of peaceable abstinence?

Some answers appear rooted in regions of the brain active during decision making.

"It's perhaps not just that people are slaves to pleasure, but that they have trouble thinking through a decision," said Charlotte Boettiger, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and lead author of a study in the December issue of the Journal of Neuroscience that took a novel tack in addiction imaging research.

It's good news that we are living longer, but bad news that the longer we live, the better our odds of developing late-onset Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's is a debilitating neurodegenerative disease that causes memory loss, dementia, personality change and ultimately death. The national Alzheimer's Association estimates that 5.1 million Americans are currently afflicted with the disease and predicts that the number may increase to between 11 million and 16 million people by the year 2050.

Many Alzheimer's researchers have long touted fish oil, by pill or diet, as an accessible and inexpensive "weapon" that may delay or prevent this debilitating disease.

One person out of every thousand has synaesthesia, a psychological phenomenon in which they can smell a sound or hear a color. Most of these people are not aware they are synaesthetes and feel certain about the way they perceive things: they think the way they experience the world is normal. But, when they realize that something is not quite right, they become disappointed.

The research field has grown from grapheme-color synaesthesia to include other forms of synaesthesia in which flavors are evoked by music or words (lexical-gustatory synaesthesia), space structures by time units, colors by music, etc.

Surprising as it may seem, there are people who can smell sounds, see smells or hear colors.

In a late-year flurry, Congress passed many bills last week. Among others, Congress passed an all-in-one spending bill. It combined eleven spending bills and additional spending for the Iraq war into one. H.R. 2764, now called the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008, is the bill. Its cost per U.S. family is a little over $9,400, about $720 of which is for the additional military spending.

Most relevant to readers here is P.L. 110-140, The CLEAN Energy Act of 2007.

Costs $4.28 per family
What People Think: 51% For, 49% Against

http://www.washingtonwatch.com/bills/show/110_PL_110-140.html

If you want to read the rest of the expenditures, here you go:

H.R.

A unique electron microscope that can help create four-dimensional “movies” of molecules may hold the answers to research questions in a number of fields including chemistry, biology, and physics, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News.

In the article, C&EN Associate Editor Rachel Petkewich notes that the microscope, located at the California Institute of Technology, is a modified transmission electron microscope interfaced with an ultrafast laser. The ultrafast microscope is the only one capable of capturing four-dimensional pictures of molecules — 3-D structural changes over time — as they form and break apart, the writer states.