Urban Coyotes, Frozen Krauts, Red cells from space, Oil Sands, secure Attributes, rat brain cells fly F-22

Weird Science

there may be somewhere between several hundred and 2,000 coyotes living in Chicago.
* Urban coyotes that don’t hunt in packs can cover ranges of 50 square miles or more, often in just a night. “The first solitary coyote we tracked covered five adjacent cities in a single night..
* Urban coyotes survive far longer than their rural cousins. A coyote living in urban Chicago has a 60-percent chance of surviving for one year, while a rural coyote has a 30% chance of living for another year.
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science
Frozen Krauts
Jan. 3, 2006 ..the first baby born after being conceived with a frozen donor egg from a commercial egg bank.. Cryo Eggs International.. ..Wendy and Jared chose a donor with a similar ancestral background—German—

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Bugs from space?
world-science
..after a meteor airburst event.. on 25th July 2001 near Changanacherry (Kerala).. sonic boom experienced by several people during early morning .. “The first case of red rain occurred in this area few hours after the airburst....
.. ..The “striking red colouration..from microscopic.. red particles..which had “no similarity with usual desert dust. .. 50,000 kg of the particles have fallen
..In a few places the rainwater appeared almost like blood.”
.. The particles look like one-celled organisms and are about 4 to 10 microns wide, ..[red blood cell = 8, bacteria 1-2?]
The particles seem to lack a nucleus.. Chemical tests indicated they lacked DNA..
The outer envelope seems to contain an “inner capsule,”..
“The major constituents ..are carbon and oxygen..Silicon is most prominent among the minor constituents.. other elements found were iron, sodium, aluminum and chlorine.
.. after storage in the original rainwater at room temperature without any preservative for four years, no decay or discolouration of the particles could be found.”
..Astrophysics and Space Science, has agreed to publish the paper..
[obviously its gong to be extremely hard to distinguish exo-biology from mere complex chemistry]

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Oil companies create ponds in which to dump millions of cubic meters of the sandy, toxic by-product of oil-sand processing. These "tailings ponds" are characterized by salt and acids. Here, a worker installs a scarecrow to keep birds away .. ..
technologyreview
Where the oil sands lie close to the surface, mostly near the town of Fort McMurray in Alberta, they can be mined. In the effort to get at these sands, areas have been drained of wetlands and stripped of boreal forests, which play an important role in climate regulation and carbon storage.
..Producing crude oil from the Alberta sands is an energy-­intensive process. Giant digging and transportation machines use commensurately large amounts of fuel. Refining and welling technologies consume roughly per 300 cubic meters of natural gas barrel of recovered oil. Environmental watchdogs estimate that, as a result, producing a barrel of oil from the Alberta sands releases two to three times the volume of greenhouse gases that traditional oil production would. By 2015, production from the oil sands is projected to release 94 megatons of greenhouse gases.
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technologyreview
Internet is broken
One evolving solution, developed by Internet2 -- a research consortium based in Ann Arbor, MI, that develops advanced Internet technologies for use by research laboratories and universities -- effectively creates a middleman who does the job. Called Shibboleth, the software mediates between a sender and a recipient; it transmits the appropriate ID numbers, passwords, and other identifying information to the right recipients for you, securely, through the centralized exchange of digital certificates and other means. ..
In addition to making the dispersal of information more secure, it helps protect privacy. That's because it discloses only the "attributes" of a person pertinent to a particular transaction, rather than the person's full "identity."
[the 'central' agency seems problematic, but the idea of "attributes" is one of the many great features of PKC - Public Key Cryprography - that should be ubiquitous but aint]

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technologyreview
With 9,000 megawatts of installed capacity, Spain ranked second in the world in 2005 in total installed capacity, behind Germany (16,000 megawatts) and ahead of the United States (6,500 megawatts).
..Spanish companies.. Gamesa Eólica (world's second largest turbine manufacturer), Iberdrola (world's largest wind-farm owner and operator) and Acciona Energía (world's largest wind-farm builder and developer).

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livejournal independent Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
..thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.
By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate "reads" per day...plans to extend the database .. to 100 million number plates.. each day ..

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Why this brain flies on rat cunning
theage
It sounds like science fiction: a brain nurtured in a Petri dish learns to pilot a fighter plane as scientists develop a new breed of "living" computer. But in groundbreaking experiments in a Florida laboratory that is exactly what is happening.
The "brain", grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at the University of Florida.
They hope their research into neural computation will help them develop sophisticated hybrid computers, with a thinking biological component.
One target is to install living computers in unmanned aircraft so they can be deployed on missions too dangerous for humans. ..
The brain-in-a-dish is the idea of Thomas DeMarse, 37, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida...
The 25,000 neurons were suspended in a specialised liquid to keep them alive and then laid across a grid of 60 electrodes in a small glass dish.
Urban Coyotes Frozen Krauts Red cells from space Oil Sands secure Attributes rat brain cells fly F-22