] An archaeologist from the University of South Carolina on
] Wednesday announced radiocarbon tests that dated the
] first human settlement in North America to 50,000 years
] ago -- at least 25,000 years before other known human
] sites on the continent.

Indians are old.

CNN.com - Scientist: Man in Americas earlier than thought - Nov 17, 2004

] If you don't try to hold your breath, exposure to space
] for half a minute or so is unlikely to produce permanent
] injury. Holding your breath is likely to damage your
] lungs, something scuba divers have to watch out for when
] ascending, and you'll have eardrum trouble if your
] Eustachian tubes are badly plugged up, but theory
] predicts -- and animal experiments confirm -- that
] otherwise, exposure to vacuum causes no immediate injury.
] You do not explode. Your blood does not boil. You do not
] freeze. You do not instantly lose consciousness.
]
] Various minor problems (sunburn, possibly "the bends",
] certainly some [mild, reversible, painless] swelling of
] skin and underlying tissue) start after ten seconds or
] so. At some point you lose consciousness from lack of
] oxygen. Injuries accumulate. After perhaps one or two
] minutes, you're dying. The limits are not really known.

The language here seemed almost poetic.

Human Body in a Vacuum

] A new means of propelling spacecraft being developed at
] the University of Washington could dramatically cut the
] time needed for astronauts to travel to and from Mars and
] could make humans a permanent fixture in space.
]
] In fact, with magnetized-beam plasma propulsion, or
] mag-beam, quick trips to distant parts of the solar
] system could become routine, said Robert Winglee, a UW
] Earth and space sciences professor who is leading the
] project.

Awesome!

Newswise: Plasma Beam would get people in Mars in 90 days

] NASA scientists have found that cirrus clouds, formed by
] contrails from aircraft engine exhaust, are capable of
] increasing average surface temperatures enough to account
] for a warming trend in the United States that occurred
] between 1975 and 1994.

Boing Boing: airplane exhaust scars

] You can hear sferics, tweeks, whistlers and other VLF
] radio sounds at any time of the day, but the hours
] around dawn and dusk are generally best. Nighttime is
] also better than daytime. In Huntsville, AL, where
] our online receiver is located, dawn happens at about
] 1200 UT and dusk is ten hours later at 2200 UT.

This is good white noise. Makes you feel spacey, too.

NASA online VLF receiver

] Zhu explained that the immune systems of some individuals
] may be capable of resisting HIV infection. These
] individuals who do not appear to be infected with HIV
] despite multiple sexual encounters with HIV infected
] partners are referred to as exposed seronegatives (ES).
]
] To be specific, any one who has conducted sexual
] activities at least twice weekly in four consecutive
] months with an HIV-infected partner might be identified
] as ES.
]
] Of 11 ES cases, two cases have later been identified as
] carrying the mutant genes.
]
] In Zhu's opinion, if medicine functioning similarly with
] the genes was put in the vagina and rectum, the HIV virus
] couldn't find its carrier to enter the human body and
] thus would be expelled.
]
] In Shenzhen, both confirmed samples are women who have
] been exposed to HIV for many years but remained
] uninfected.

Two women found with HIV-immune mutant gene

My education has been greatly inhibited by so often being limited to the abstracts unless I go to the library and track the journal down. Sneaker net sucks.

Science Publishing Needs to be more open

] A new type of pump to help failing hearts will undergo
] clinical trials in autumn 2004 in the UK. Its design
]
] is intended to solve the problems of mechanical failure
] and blood clotting that have bedevilled artificial hearts
] and pumps since they were invented.
]
] The pump also has a curious side effect: people implanted
] with the device have no pulse.

weird.

Simpler pump boosts failing hearts

] The Hubble Ultra Deep Field images and data, released
] Tuesday at the Space Telescope Science Institute in
] Baltimore, provide the first glimpses of galactic
] activity from around 700 million years after the Big
] Bang, reaching back into our celestial history about 300
] million years further than previous observations.

Worth a look. Galaxy Soup.

Wired News: Hubble Offers Glimpse of Creation

The results support the idea that HIV arrived in the United States around 1968, long before the first AIDS cases appeared. AIDS was first reported in 1981 and was retrospectively recognized as having struck in the late 1970s. This is compatible with HIV's roughly ten-year incubation period.

HIV's history traced HIV's History Traced: US virus arrived early and spread fast.