Eideard

Louis Jacques Daguerre’s first surviving daguerreotype image, of a collection of plaster casts on a window ledge, which he produced on a silver plate, in 1837

Louis Daguerre devised the daguerreotype, the first successful form of permanent photography. The French physicist developed the process for transferring photographs onto silver-coated copper plates. His discovery was made by an accident, according to the writer Robert Leggat, who said Daguerre put an exposed plate in a chemical cupboard in 1835 only to later find it have developed a latent image. The daguerreotype process was unveiled at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1839. It became the first commercially successful was of getting permanent images from a camera.

Another delightful photo essay from the pages of The Telegraph.

Jim Faulds at the Fly Ranch geyser

An ambitious University of Nevada, Reno project to understand and characterize geothermal potential at nearly 500 sites throughout the Great Basin is yielding a bounty of information for the geothermal industry to use in developing resources in Nevada, according to a report to the U.S. Department of Energy…

The research aims to provide a catalogue of favorable structural elements, such as the pattern of faulting and models for geothermal systems and site-specific targeting using innovative techniques for fault analysis.  The project will enhance exploration methodologies and reduce the risk of drilling nonproductive wells.

Jim Faulds, principal investigator for the project, geologist and research professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, has a team of six researchers and several graduate students working with him on various aspects of the project.

“Of the 463 geothermal sites to study, we’ve studied and characterized more than 250 in the past year, either using existing records or on-site analyses,” Faulds said. “We’ll continue to study more of the sites so we can develop better methods and tools for geothermal exploration. Most, about two-thirds, of the geothermal resources in the Great Basin are blind – that is, there are no surface expressions, such as hot springs, to indicate what’s perhaps 1,500 feet below the surface…”

“The geothermal industry doesn’t have the same depth of knowledge for geothermal exploration as the mineral and oil industries,” he said. “Mineral and oil companies conducted extensive research years ago that helps them to characterize favorable settings and determine where to drill. With geothermal, it’s studies like this that will enhance understanding of what controls hot fluids in the earth’s crust and thus provide an exploration basis for industry to use in discovering and developing resources.”

Faulds and his team have defined a spectrum of favorable structural settings for geothermal systems in the Great Basin and completed a preliminary catalogue that interprets the structural setting of most its geothermal systems…

Bravo. An often overlooked alternative energy source in the United States. Some nations – like Iceland – rely almost completely on geothermal sources for residential and commercial energy requirements. Many other around the world consider this an automatic portion of the energy mix.

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t…”

Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.

These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress.

RTFA for the details. The questions asked about job security, employment, acquired skills are interesting, relevant.

Pay fees like that a few times and you run full speed to the nearest software design firm. Now that we’ve achieved the quality of data mining at least capable of performing tasks previously left to graduates from the bottom third of their law class – and took three tries to become admitted to the bar.

A spectacular haul of stone tools discovered beneath a collapsed rock shelter in southern Arabia has forced a major rethink of the story of human migration out of Africa. The collection of hand axes and other tools shaped to cut, pierce and scrape bear the hallmarks of early human workmanship, but date from 125,000 years ago, around 55,000 years before our ancestors were thought to have left the continent.

The artefacts, uncovered in the United Arab Emirates, point to a much earlier dispersal of ancient humans, who probably cut across from the Horn of Africa to the Arabian peninsula via a shallow channel in the Red Sea that became passable at the end of an ice age. Once established, these early pioneers may have pushed on across the Persian Gulf, perhaps reaching as far as India, Indonesia and eventually Australia.

Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at Oxford University who was not involved in the work, told the Science journal: “This is really quite spectacular. It breaks the back of the current consensus view.”

1. Pretty consistent with human spirit to have early adopters.

2. Perfectly consistent for scientists to be open to further examination of existing theories. It’s part of what peer review is about.

Anatomically modern humans – those that resemble people alive today – evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Until now, most archaeological evidence has supported an exodus from Africa, or several waves of migration, along the Mediterranean coast or the Arabian shoreline between 80,000 and 60,000 years ago…

The stones, a form of silica-rich rock called chert, were dated by Simon Armitage, a researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, using a technique that measured how long sand grains around the artefacts had been buried…

The discovery has sparked debate among archaeologists, some of whom say much stronger evidence is needed to back up the researchers’ claims. “I’m totally unpersuaded,” Paul Mellars, an archaeologist at Cambridge University, told Science. “There’s not a scrap of evidence here that these were made by modern humans, nor that they came from Africa.”

Chris Stringer, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, said: “The region of Arabia has been terra incognita in trying to map the dispersal of modern humans from Africa during the last 120,000 years, leading to much theorising in the face of few data.

“Despite the confounding lack of diagnostic fossil evidence, this archaeological work provides important clues that early modern humans might have dispersed from Africa across Arabia, as far as the Straits of Hormuz, by 120,000 years ago.”

The debate will continue. More will be learned. It is the nature of good science.

RTFA and reflect upon the first bits of information coming from the research.

For amateur astronomers, discovering a supernova is a significant and rare feat. For a 10-year-old amateur to do it — well, that’s astronomical.

Kathryn Aurora Gray of Fredericton, N.B. is basking in the spotlight after noticing what was later determined to be a magnitude 17 supernova, or exploding star, on New Year’s Eve.

It’s in the distant galaxy UGC 3378, about 240 million light years away, in the constellation of Camelopardalis.

The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada says Kathryn is the youngest person to make such a discovery, which was soon verified by amateur astronomers in Illinois and Arizona. The finding has been reported to, confirmed and announced by the International Astronomical Union.

Supernovas are stellar explosions that signal the violent deaths of stars several times the mass of our sun. They are extremely bright, and cause a burst of radiation…

She is still on Christmas break, so none of her schoolmates know yet, except for one of her friends who popped by for a play date Monday…

Paul Gray is an amateur astronomer and his daughter expressed an interest in the field last year. Kathryn learned that a 14-year-old discovered a supernova, and felt she could top that…

“It’s fantastic that someone so young would be passionate about astronomy. What an incredible discovery. We’re all very excited,” said Deborah Thompson, executive director of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.

The new supernova is called Supernova 2010lt.

I think it should be called Kathryn.

It may be an old menu standby to Vietnamese diners, but it’s turned into a smorgasbord of discovery for scientists.

Researchers have identified a previously undocumented species of all-female lizard in the Mekong River delta that can reproduce itself by cloning, and the story of how it was discovered is almost as exotic as the animal itself.

Leiolepis ngovantrii is a small lizard found only in southern Vietnam. A Vietnamese reptile scientist who came across tanks full of the remarkably similar looking reptiles at small diners in rural villages in Ba Ria-Vung Tau province became intrigued when he noticed that all of the lizards appeared to be female.

So the scientist, Ngo Van Tri of the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, contacted an American colleague about what he was seeing. His friend — a herpetologist at La Sierra University in Riverside, California — immediately dropped everything to come out to assess the find.

Dr. Lee Grismer and his son, Jesse Grismer, a doctoral candidate, flew all the way to Hanoi and then faced a grueling two-day motorcycle trip out to a restaurant where the owner promised to set aside a stash of the creatures for study.

“Unfortunately, the owner wound up getting drunk, and grilled them all up for his patrons… so when we got there, there was nothing left.”

Faced with an empty tank and nearly dashed hopes, the men asked around at other cafes in the area for the local delicacy, and hired children to track down as many of the lizards as they could find.

The team soon had more than 60, and realized they had something special on their hands: a previously undocumented species.

“It’s an entirely new lineage of life that was being eaten and sold in restaurants for food,” says Grismer. “But it’s something that scientists have missed for hundreds of years.”

RTFA. Humorous, especially when the Americans discovered the “flavor” of these wee lizards was unlike anything they ever ate – or wished to, again.

At first, the kids thought the body on the front porch of a trailer in a mobile home park in Newberry Township was a Halloween decoration. But upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a real-life horror show – a 68-year-old man who had ended his own life with a bullet from a handgun, police said.

Next door neighbor Donna Jones was helping her friend’s daughter and another child get ready for the township’s trick-or-treat night.

After they left and went next door, Jones said, her friend screamed for her to come outside and call for help.

Newberry Township Police Chief John Snyder said the children discovered the body of John Sucic shortly after 6 p.m. on the porch of his trailer in the Conewago Valley Mobile Home Park in the 800 block of York Road…

Police officers covered the body with a sheet and put up police tape to prevent other trick-or-treaters from seeing the scene.

Jones said the children who discovered the body are about 4 to 5 years old and were anxious to head over to Sucic’s home when they saw his outdoor light was on.

Other neighbors didn’t notice anything until the police arrived…

The investigation showed that Sucic had shot himself in the head. Snyder said the police had indications he had made arrangements prior to killing himself. It appeared, Snyder said, the man’s body was on the porch for about a day before the kids made the discovery.

Not even any nosy neighbors in the trailer park, eh?

A team of astrophysicists based in Australia and England has uncovered evidence that the laws of physics are different in different parts of the universe.

The report describes how one of the supposed fundamental constants of Nature appears not to be constant after all. Instead, this ‘magic number’ known as the fine-structure constant – ‘alpha’ for short – appears to vary throughout the universe.

“After measuring alpha in around 300 distant galaxies, a consistency emerged: this magic number, which tells us the strength of electromagnetism, is not the same everywhere as it is here on Earth, and seems to vary continuously along a preferred axis through the universe,” Professor John Webb from the University of New South Wales said.

“The implications for our current understanding of science are profound. If the laws of physics turn out to be merely ‘local by-laws’, it might be that whilst our observable part of the universe favours the existence of life and human beings, other far more distant regions may exist where different laws preclude the formation of life, at least as we know it.”

“If our results are correct, clearly we shall need new physical theories to satisfactorily describe them…”

“It varies by only a tiny amount – about one part in 100,000 – over most of the observable universe, but it’s possible that much larger variations could occur beyond our observable horizon,” Julian King said.

The discovery will force scientists to rethink their understanding of Nature’s laws. “The fine structure constant, and other fundamental constants, are absolutely central to our current theory of physics. If they really do vary, we’ll need a better, deeper theory,” Dr Michael Murphy from Swinburne University said.

“While a ‘varying constant’ would shake our understanding of the world around us extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What we’re finding is extraordinary, no doubt about that.”

“It’s one of the biggest questions of modern science – are the laws of physics the same everywhere in the universe and throughout its entire history? We’re determined to answer this burning question one way or the other.”

Wow! Burning question? You betcha.

Advancing our species’ understanding of how this small ball of mud we call Earth got here and eventually became a pressure cooker producing all sorts of individual critters – is indeed a useful if not critical question.

1937 issue of newspaper wrapped around crockery next to the bodies

Officials plan to perform autopsies on the remains of two babies found wrapped in newspapers from the 1930s and stuffed in a trunk in an L.A. basement.

The L.A. County coroner’s office and Los Angeles Police Department are trying to figure out how the babies died and how they got to the basement. The autopsies will involve a pathologist and an anthropologist. Investigators also will try to use DNA testing to determine whether the babies are related and toxicology tests to find out why they died.

Officials with knowledge of the case said one of the babies appeared to be premature — and might have been miscarried or aborted. The other baby appeared to be a newborn…

The trunk appears to have belonged to a woman named Jean M. Barrie. Inside it were postcards sent to her from far-flung locales such as Korea and South America and a pile of black-and-white photographs that showed a beautiful, fair-haired woman — who may have been Barrie — on vacation and in a wedding gown…

Records show a Jean Barrie who worked as a nurse and lived about three miles from the Glen-Donald apartment building, which is at the corner of South Lake Street and what is now James M. Wood Boulevard, in 1933.

Authorities said they were classifying the discovery as a “death investigation.” They stressed that it was too early to tell if this was a homicide case but vowed to find out what had happened to the babies.

Gonna be a hell of a movie. And forensic anthropology is fascinating – anytime.

UPDATE: Turns out Ms. Barrie emigrated from Scotland in the 1920′s – first, to Canada; then, down to the USA. Worked as a home nurse for the invalid wife of an LA dentist – who she married a little while after his wife died. Read on.

The body of one of France’s best-known chefs was discovered hidden in a freezer after his girlfriend revealed to her daughter that “something unfortunate” had happened to him, police said.

The frozen corpse of Jean-Francois Poinard, the retired restaurateur, was found by detectives at an apartment in Lyon, south-east France.

The body of the 71-year-old man – one of Lyon’s top chefs in the 1970s and 80s – is believed to have been concealed in the freezer for up to two years, officers said.

They made the discovery after Mr Poinard’s former girlfriend Guylene Collober, 51, told her daughter on a night out that “something unfortunate” had befallen her lover. The daughter informed police, who raided the apartment on Tuesday.

“A full post-mortem examination will be carried out to discover the precise cause of death.”

Mrs Collober had been taken into custody charged with hiding a body, but faced further charges depending on the findings of the autopsy, the spokesman said.

Lyon newspaper Le Progres described Mr Poinard as one of the city’s “great names” in gastronomy.

So, who’s been going to the freezer and taking out frozen snacks all this time?