Science & Technology

By CARRIE PEYTON DAHLBERG
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
A young couple leaned toward each other over cappuccinos, retired roommates sipped red wine, and at the front of a bustling cafe, anthropology professor Sandy Harcourt talked about man and monkey.

Monkeys' choices about who they groom, Harcourt said, can help humans understand the biological roots of our own obsession with royalty and movie stars.

"Monkeys groom the 'Tom Cruise.' They direct their nice behavior to the high-ranking animal," Harcourt said as he wove a tale of primate behavior for a rapt and sometimes skeptical audience.

Questions flew, Harcourt's ideas were challenged repeatedly, and the talk was punctuated by breaks for beer and wine _ all trademarks of a growing international movement of science cafes.

Such cafis, springing up as science becomes increasingly complex and political, offer a chance to relax with the subject instead.

By DAVID TEMPLETON
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Driving city miles can be dangerous and cause hypertension. But that challenge increases greatly when the moving vehicle no longer has a human driver.

In the case of Carnegie Mellon University's Tartan Racing team, the driver is a bank of computers with new-age software, radar devices, sensors, lasers, cameras and global positioning systems, along with various other high-tech doohickeys, gizmos and gadgets.

And the big question is, will it wend its way through the cityscape and return? If so, will it leave a wake of traffic violations and downed utility poles? Will its computers need air bags?

Those are the issues facing the Tartan Racing team, which is busy turning a Chevrolet Tahoe into a robomobile that can compete in next November's Urban Challenge.

The event, which the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency will hold at a Western site to be announced, will require robotic vehicles to navigate 60 mock city miles through traffic to carry out missions without human interaction.

DARPA competitions entice research teams to push wheeled technology to new heights.

Previous challenges offered a top prize of $2 million, but Congress did not fund the award for next year's competition.

By David Milstead
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
E.W. Scripps is among a group of more than 150 newspapers from seven companies that have struck a wide-reaching alliance with Internet giant Yahoo.

The first step in the partnership, announced this morning, is designed to bolster classified advertising sales, with local help-wanted ads becoming part of Yahoo's HotJobs site.

By RYAN KIM
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Sam Altman was leaving a computer science class at Stanford last year when he wondered where his friends were.

It's an age-old question, but it got thinking of a different way of arriving at the answer.

By STEVEN OBERBECK
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
The rocket motor roared to life, lighting up the night sky with a blinding flame and sending a cloud of exhaust and dust thousands of feet into the air.

The rare night test of the Alliant Techsystems rocket motor, nearly identical in design to those used to help lift the space shuttle into orbit, went off with barely a hitch, although for a time the test was threatened by unfavorable wind conditions.When the motor was finally lit, it burned for 124 seconds and generated 15.4 million horsepower before a crowd of thousands.

Inside ATK's control center in an underground bunker less than a quarter of a mile away from the roaring engine, several dozen engineers and command personnel hunkered down and watched on video monitors as the motor exhausted its available supply of fuel.

"During the test you can feel the ground shake and hear the glass panels in this building rumble," ATK's Director of Test Services Kevin Rees said during a dry run of the rocket test days earlier.

By BARRIE McKENNA
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
To an adult, it all seems like child's play.

Visitors to clubpenguin.com adopt a penguin character, then enter an animated world that is a mix of gaming, chat and fantasy.

By LEE BOWMAN
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
The carbon soot of forest fires contributes to global warming, right?

Not necessarily when the fires occur in the northern forests of Alaska, Canada and Siberia, according to a new study published online Friday by the journal Science.

Although the forest fires "release greenhouse gases that contribute to climate warming, inseparable changes in the forest canopy cause more sunlight to be reflected back into space during spring and summer for many decades after a fire," said James Randerson, an associate professor of earth science at the University of California-Irvine and lead author of the study.

"This cooling effect cancels the impact of the greenhouse gases, so the net effect of fire is close to neutral when averaged globally, and in northern regions may lead to slightly colder temperatures."

Randerson and his colleagues focused their research on the Donnelly Flats fire, which burned about 16,500 acres in central Alaska in June 1999.

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Thursday, November 16, 2006

By LEE BOWMAN
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Studies by two international teams working with DNA recovered from the same 38,000-year-old Neanderthal leg bone indicate that our extinct yet nearest hominid relative was more than 99.5 percent genetically identical to us.

The largest comparison of gene codes yet done determined that the last common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals lived about 700,000 years ago.

By GREG LAVINE
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
The cone snails are at it again.

University of Utah researchers have harvested yet another substance from cone snail venom that holds promise in treating pain in humans.