Give Thanks? Science Supersized Your Turkey Dinner -- Wired

Your corn is sweeter, your potatoes are starchier and your turkey is much, much bigger than the foods that sat on your grandparents' Thanksgiving dinner table.

... "Americans eat a pound of sugar every two-and-a-half days. The average amount of sugar consumed by an Englishman in the 1700s was about a pound a year," said food historian Kathleen Curtin of Plimoth Plantation, a historical site that recreates the 17th-century colony. "If you haven't had a candy bar, your taste buds aren't jaded, and your apple tastes sweet."

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Clue to break-up of ice shelves -- BBC

US researchers have come up with a way to predict the rate at which ice shelves break apart into icebergs. These sometimes spectacular occurrences, called calving events, are a key step in the process by which climate change drives sea level rise.

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Brains More Distracted, Not Slower with Age - Scientific America

Brains slow down as they become more easily distracted. Older brains do not think as quickly as younger brains do. But does this cognitive impairment arise because processing speeds slacken or because the ability to block out irrelevant information falters? A recent study reconciles these two leading hypotheses: older brains have a harder time ignoring distractions in the initial stages of performing a task, which slows down processing.

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Amazon deforestation accelerates -- BBC

The destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has accelerated for the first time in four years, Brazilian officials say. Satellite images show 11,968 sq km of land was cleared in the year to July, nearly 4% higher than the year before.

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Movie Studios Gang Up on Aussie ISP -- PCWorld

iiNet gets into hot water for attempting to protect customers. In case you didn't know, iiNet is being sued for not doing anything to stop its users from downloading stuff off the Internet. It's a case that could change the landscape of the Internet industry in this country if iiNet loses, as Roadshow, Universal, Paramount, Disney, Fox, Warner Bros. and Columbia, as well as Channel Seven, seek unspecified damages.

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Putting the Kibosh on Spam-Spewing McColo -- PCWorld

When McColo was taken down, worldwide spam volume dropped by 75 percent. Roger A. Grimes looks at how the spam-loving ISP was taken down, and lessons we can learn from this rare anti-spam success.

... It appears that a single security company and a technology columnist for The Washington Post has succeeded in bringing down worldwide spam rates 75% or more. No single event has ever accomplished what Brian Krebs and security firm Security Fix did nearly two weeks ago.

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Shuttle astronaut invents zero-gravity cup -- Reuters

Future space travelers may be drinking their own urine, thanks to the International Space Station's new water recycler, but they can now do so with a touch of class.

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Meteor streaking across Canadian sky caught on video -- Scientific America

Hundreds of people witnessed a meteor lighting up the evening sky over Edmonton, Alberta, last week, and the spectacular fireball was even caught on tape by unsuspecting videographers. Around 5:30 P.M. MST Thursday, a brilliant streak of light shot across the western Canadian sky, setting meteorite hunters on a chase to find any surviving fragments of the object.

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Who needs fossil fuels? 3 green power ideas escape the lab -- Ars Technica

Last week, Greentech Media hosted a conference focused on generating and delivering power in efficient and environmentally-friendly ways. Most of those presenting were involved in private companies that had received enough venture capital to develop a functioning product, but they weren't ready to start widespread sales or deployments of that product. Their presentations should be viewed with a degree of caution -- there was no shortage of self-promotion involved -- but the fact that these companies generally had working demonstrations of their technology suggests that the self-promotion wasn't pure hype.

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Photos: A vast zeppelin over the Valley -- CNET

CNET News' Daniel Terdiman takes a ride in Airship Ventures' 246-foot Zeppelin NT as it gets officially dedicated. Will passengers scream "Eureka" to the loo with a view?

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Schools, Fools and the Tools of Ignorance -- PC World

If not for help from a handful of geeks, Connecticut school teacher Julie Amero would be in prison right now for crimes she didn't commit. What's wrong with this picture?

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Ars Technica -- The Future of Driving:

Part I: Robots and Grand Challenges

Part II: Life after Driving

Part III: Hack My Ride

How the Telescope Changed Our Minds -- Wired

The telescope changed everything about how we see our place in the universe. But it took a leap of faith to accept the views of telescopes as real, just as it takes a leap to trust images produced by modern technology such as the microscope, the MRI and supercolliders.

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Green Energy: Cost-Efficient Process Expected To Turn Algae Into Fuel -- AP

Set amid cornfields and cow pastures in eastern Holland is a shallow pool that is rapidly turning green with algae, harvested for animal feed, skin treatments, biodegradable plastics -- and with increasing interest, biofuel.

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SpaceX Did It -- Falcon 1 Made it to Space -- Wired

SpaceX has made history. Its privately developed rocket has made it into space.
After three failed launches, the company founded by Elon Musk worked all of the bugs out of their Falcon 1 launch vehicles.
The entire spectacle was broadcast live from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific. Cameras mounted on the spacecraft showed our planet shrinking in the distance and the empty first stage engine falling back to Earth.

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Carbon Trading Won't Save Aviation and Shipping -- Wired

Carbon trading schemes won't solve the aviation and shipping industries' problem of soaring carbon emissions, a British climate scientist says, and the cuts needed to address global climate change are so deep that both sectors must limit their growth.

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On Bailout, Candidates Were Surely Themselves -- NY Times

It was classic John McCain and classic Barack Obama who grappled with the $700 billion bailout plan over the last week: Mr. McCain was by turns action-oriented and impulsive as he dive-bombed targets, while Mr. Obama was measured and cerebral and inclined to work the phones behind the scenes.

... Aides and political allies to both men agreed Sunday that perhaps no episode thus far in the campaign better demonstrated how they would approach managing problems as president. Their instincts, temperaments, and leadership traits were in the spotlight in Washington, as well as their limitations and foibles -- characteristics that also showed through stylistically in Friday night's debate.

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Artist Builds Temple of Science -- Wired

At a time when the gulf between religion and science is growing ever greater, an artist has erected a temple for scientific worship. Jonathon Keats, designer of the petri dish God, built The Atheon to get people thinking about what a scientific religion (or religious science?) would look and feel like.

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Where Is Human Evolution Heading? - U.S. News & World Report

If you judge the progress of humanity by Homer Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Girls Gone Wild videos, you might conclude that our evolution has stalled—or even shifted into reverse. Not so, scientists say. Humans are evolving faster than ever before, picking up new genetic traits and talents that may help us survive a turbulent future.

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How Did Life on Earth Get Started? - U.S. News & World Report

On an arid outcropping of basalt in northwestern Australia, some of the oldest rocks on Earth lie exposed to the fierce sun. Formed at the bottom of an ancient ocean, this volcanic material shelters what one scientist calls the "oldest robust evidence" of life. At a scientific meeting at Rockefeller University in May, Roger Buick of the University of Washington said that the 3.5 billion-year-old rocks hold traces of carbon that once made up living organisms.

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Will Respirators Help Our Olympic Athletes? - Slate

Four members of the U.S. Olympic cycling team sparked outrage Tuesday when they disembarked in Beijing wearing masks covering their mouths and noses. The U.S. Olympic Committee has issued several hundred respirators to its athletes to use as they prepare to compete at the Games. Will those masks actually help?

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U.S. Cyclists Are Masked, and Criticism Is Not - NY Times

After months of speculation about how Olympic athletes would react to the air quality problems here, some answers arrived at the airport Tuesday, when four track cyclists on the United States team stepped off their flight wearing masks over their mouths and noses.

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