A ten-year study comparing organic tomatoes with standard produce found almost double the level of flavonoids - a type of antioxidant.

Flavonoids have been shown to reduce high blood pressure, lowering the risk of heart disease and stroke.

Writing in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the team said nitrogen in the soil may be the key.

Labels: Personal, Science

Deep-sea explorers said Friday they have mined what could be the richest shipwreck treasure in history, bringing home 17 tons of colonial-era silver and gold coins from an undisclosed site in the Atlantic Ocean.

Estimated value: $500 million.

A jet chartered by Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration landed in the United States recently with hundreds of plastic containers brimming with coins raised from the ocean floor, Odyssey co-chairman Greg Stemm said. The more than 500,000 pieces are expected to fetch an average of $1,000 each from collectors and investors.

"For this colonial era, I think (the find) is unprecedented," said rare coin expert Nick Bruyer, who examined a batch of coins from the wreck. "I don't know of anything equal or comparable to it."

Citing security concerns, the company declined to release any details about the ship or the wreck site Friday. Stemm said a formal announcement will come later, but court records indicate the coins might come from a 400-year-old ship found off England.

Labels: Science

Apple put a banner with the words "A Greener Apple" on the front page of its website, linking to a personal letter from Steve Jobs. In it he says in effect that Apple's consumers, employees, shareholders and the industry "want us to be a leader in [becoming greener], just as we are in the other areas of our business. So today we're changing our policy." That's right, people: you've done it -- you've moved Apple.

However, it's not everything we asked for. While customers in the US will be able to return their Apple products for recycling knowing that their gear won't end up in the e-waste mountains of Asia and India, Apple isn't making that promise to anyone but customers in the USA. Elsewhere in the world, an Apple product today can still be tomorrow's e-waste. Other manufacturers offer worldwide takeback and recycling. Apple should too!

Apple hasn't gotten an actual green product to market, but no other electronics manufacture has either.

Apple must begin to address these growing problems to ensure that the workers and children of Asia and many developing nations no longer face the unnecessary environmental and health dangers posed by the high-tech industry's waste.

Our work isn't over until Apple users get that.

Labels: Apple, Science

The ashes of Star Trek actor James Doohan have been successfully launched into space from a site in New Mexico, watched by cheering fans.

Part of the remains of the actor, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, were sent about 70 miles above the earth on a private SpaceLoft XL rocket.

His widow Wende helped "press the button" for her husband's final voyage.

Doohan's ashes were accompanied by the remains of former US astronaut Gordon Cooper and those of 200 other people.

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's remains were fired into space in 1997, six years after his death.

Labels: Science

It's easy enough to find paper towels, cosmetics, and cars that are good for the environment, but if you're looking to buy a green PC or cell phone, the task gets much harder.

It's not that the PC industry is at odds with Mother Nature. Many tech companies have been making big, public commitments to green products and processes.

Dell's Plant a Tree For Me program lets you make a small donation to two environmental organizations while buying a notebook or desktop PC. Retailers like Radio Shack and Best Buy have electronics-recycling programs for disposing of unwanted cell phones, batteries, and other products. (The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has compiled a list of recycling programs.) But when it comes to buying a product that's less toxic to the environment, knowing what your options are isn't easy.

Labels: Science

Tiny bits of protein extracted from a 68-million-year-old dinosaur bone have given scientists the first genetic proof that the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex is a distant cousin to the modern chicken.

"It's the first molecular evidence of this link between birds and dinosaurs," said John Asara, a Harvard Medical School researcher, whose results were published in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Scientists have long suspected that birds evolved from dinosaurs based on a study of dinosaur bones, but until recently, no soft tissue had survived to confirm the link.

Labels: Science

Technologies have advanced in the past 15 years but that doesn't mean our fuel-efficiency has. A flashback to 1992 shows that fuel mileage has remained stagnant and even regressed in some cases.

Five 1992-vintage cars outperform the best gasoline-powered offerings from 2007 while a sixth equals them in highway mileage.

The most shocking of the apples-to-apples showdowns is the Honda Civic. In the last 15 years the Civic has given up ground in a big, nearly unimaginable way; dropping 12 MPG city and 8 MPG highway. How is this possible? The four-cylinder engine has grown from 1.5-liters in '92 to 1.8-liters in 2007. But come on, engine displacement is not the issue, overall displacement, read curb weight, is.

Just as Americans have embraced obesity, the lowly Civic has gone from 2094 pounds in 1992 CX hatchback trim to 2751 pounds in 2007 sedan trim; the additional 657 pounds of girth in the '07 version will certainly make efficiency numbers plummet. Calculating a sedan versus sedan comparison reveals the 1992 edition to be 432 pounds lighter on the scales.

Labels: Science

Ever wished you could do something about global warming?
Pretty

It might seem there's nothing you can do about global warming. The problem is just too big.

Of course, we all contribute to global warming. We all have a "carbon footprint," the total carbon dioxide emissions we create when we drive or fly or use electricity.

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The first step you can take to fight global warming is to reduce your carbon footprint through conservation. Drive less. Turn down the thermostat. Buy locally produced goods.

Then use TerraPass to reduce your carbon footprint all the way to zero.

When you buy a TerraPass, your money funds renewable energy projects such as wind farms. These projects result in verified reductions in greenhouse gas pollution. And these reductions counterbalance your own emissions.

Labels: Personal, Science

Greenpeace this week said that PC maker Lenovo was the world's most environmentally friendly electronics firm, thanks to dramatic improvements in its hardware recycling efforts. Meanwhile, Mac-maker Apple, which has global warming guru Al Gore on its board of directors, came in dead last on the list of 14 firms Greenpeace highlighted.

Last place Apple lost marks for its toxic chemical use and poor recycling efforts. In fact, Greenpeace is so disturbed by Apple's poor marks that it's set up a special Web site describing the problems. "Why do Macs, iPods, iBooks and the rest of [Apple's] product line contain hazardous substances that other companies have abandoned?" the site reads. "A cutting edge company shouldn't be cutting lives short by exposing thousands of children in the developing world to dangerous chemicals."

Apple just doesn't prioritize environmental concerns. Sure, they have a nice Environment section on their website. But it's not linked from the front page, and it's hard to find unless you know where to look. Of course it says how great Apple's policies are. But if you look under the hood, Apple's policies are as ugly as a beige box circa 1989.

Labels: Apple, Science

A single incandescent 100-watt light bulb left on around the clock for a year costs more than US$80 to power. Generating that power releases about 1,350 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere.

According to Dean DeWhitt, director of Microsoft’s Windows Kernel team, that is about the same amount of power many PCs consume while not in use. Yet, while few people would leave a light bulb on for a year, many people keep their PCs running with screen-savers at all hours, which actually consumes more energy than an idling PC. What’s more, many large organizations constantly leave their PCs running so they are available to receive security patches and updates.

Known as Standby or Hibernate in previous versions, Sleep is a state where a machine and monitor can become available instantly if needed, but are each using only two to three watts of electricity in the meantime. While other versions of Windows have had success with standby modes, according to DeWhitt, Windows Vista’s version of Sleep provides by far the best user experience to date.

Labels: Mac, Science, Vista

A report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr. Gore’s portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.

Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said on a blog that Mr. Gore’s film did “indeed do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios.” But the June report, he added, shows “that all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years.”

Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

The consensus catechism about global warming has six tenets: 1. Global warming is happening. 2. It is our (humanity's, but especially America's) fault. 3. It will continue unless we mend our ways. 4. If it continues we are in grave danger. 5. We know how to slow or even reverse the warming. 6. The benefits from doing that will far exceed the costs.

Only the first tenet is clearly true, and only in the sense that the Earth warmed about 0.7 degrees Celsius in the 20th century.

Eighty-five percent of Americans say warming is probably happening, and 62 percent say it threatens them personally. The National Academy of Sciences says the rise in the Earth's surface temperature has been about one degree Fahrenheit in the past century. Did 85 percent of Americans notice? Of course not. They got their anxiety from journalism calculated to produce it.

Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." Science Digest (February 1973) reported that "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age." The Christian Science Monitor ("Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect," Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers "have begun to advance," "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" and "the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool." Newsweek agreed ("The Cooling World," April 28, 1975) that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said "may mark the return to another ice age." The Times (May 21, 1975) also said "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" now that it is "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."

In fact, the Earth is always experiencing either warming or cooling.

Let’s not dispute the earth’s temperature. It’s warmer than it used to be ... The North American ice sheets reached their largest expanse about 18,000 years ago and then began to recede. Within 5000 years they had pulled back considerably but still reached south as far as central Ohio. After another thousand years, however, the U.S. was largely ice-free. Needless to say, there have been no glaciers reported in Iowa as long as anyone can remember. It’s warmer now.

Now for an inconvenient truth about CO2 sources — nature generates about 30 times as much of it as does man. Yet the warming worriers are unconcerned about nature’s outpouring. They — and Al Gore — are alarmed only about anthropogenic CO2, that 3.2 percent caused by humans.

They like to point fingers at the U.S., which generated about 23 percent of the world’s anthropogenic CO2 in 2003, the latest figures from the Energy Information Administration. But this finger-pointing ignores yet another inconvenient truth about CO2. In fact, it’s a minor contributor to the greenhouse effect when water vapor is taken into consideration. All the greenhouse gases together, including CO2 and methane, produce less than two percent of the greenhouse effect.

When water vapor is put in that perspective, then anthropogenic CO2 produces less than 0.1 of one percent of the greenhouse effect.

I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.

Labels: Science

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Labels: Health, Science