quinta-feira, 29 de outubro de 2009

Espaço

Um grupo internacional de astrofísicos detectou um corpo celeste que é o mais distante e o mais antigo registado até agora e confirmou que as estrelas já existiam quando o universo tinha apenas 600 milhões de anos.

Estas são algumas das conclusões de dois estudos publicados na revista cientifica Nature, que analisam a explosão de raios gama registada a 23 de Abril, que foi o mais distante observado até agora e que corresponde à explosão da estrela mais antiga e longínqua que se conhece.

Trata-se de uma estrela gigante que se apagou há 13 mil milhões de euros e cujo último esplendor chegou à Terra há apenas seis meses.


TSF

sexta-feira, 23 de outubro de 2009

Christian the lion - Full ending

quarta-feira, 21 de outubro de 2009

Design: Arquitecto português ganha Prémio do Público em concurso do Museu Guggenheim de Nova Iorque - dn - DN

Design: Arquitecto português ganha Prémio do Público em concurso do Museu Guggenheim de Nova Iorque - dn - DN

Futuro tentou sabotar o 'grande colisionador' - Ciência - DN

Futuro tentou sabotar o 'grande colisionador' - Ciência - DN

Investigadores portugueses caracterizam genoma inédito

Investigadores portugueses conseguiram fazer a primeira caracterização a nível mundial do genoma (transcriptoma) do mexilhão das fontes hidrotermais, permitindo criar a primeira base de dados sobre os genes deste animal, que vive no mar profundo.

«A criação desta base de dados, a primeira a nível mundial, é um grande salto evolutivo na investigação porque vai permitir perceber os mecanismos de adaptação do animal a condições extremas de sobrevivência», afirmou o investigador Raul Bettencourt, citado pela Lusa.

A investigação desenvolvida pelo Departamento de Oceanografia e Pescas (DOP) da Universidade dos Açores permitiu a aquisição de novos conhecimentos que podem vir a ter aplicação em áreas como a biotecnologia ou a medicina.

Em causa está a possível descoberta de genes com elevado valor biotecnológico ou de proteínas com propriedades anti-microbianas, que são utilizadas pelo animal para se defender dos microorganismos do meio ambiente em que vive.

No centro das atenções dos investigadores está o Bathymodiolus azoricus, um mexilhão que vive no campo hidrotermal Lucky Strike, a cerca de 1.700 metros de profundidade, na região da crista médio-atlântica, a 200 milhas a sudoeste do Faial.

domingo, 11 de outubro de 2009

Good Luck

Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn

Those who think they're unlucky should change their outlook and discover how to generate good fortune, says Richard Wiseman


Prof Richard Wiseman
Psychology of luck: Prof Richard Wiseman has discovered the secret to good luck

A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others and that it is possible to become luckier.

To launch my study, I placed advertisements in national newspapers and magazines, asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Over the years, 400 extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research from all walks of life: the youngest is an 18-year-old student, the oldest an 84-year-old retired accountant.

Jessica, a 42-year-old forensic scientist, is typical of the lucky group. As she explained: "I have my dream job, two wonderful children and a great guy whom I love very much. It's amazing; when I look back at my life, I realise I have been lucky in just about every area."

In contrast, Carolyn, a 34-year-old care assistant, is typical of the unlucky group. She is accident-prone. In one week, she twisted her ankle in a pothole, injured her back in another fall and reversed her car into a tree during a driving lesson. She was also unlucky in love and felt she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Over the years, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, questionnaires and intelligence tests, and invited them to participate in experiments. The findings have revealed that although unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their fortune.

Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.

I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: "Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250." Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.

Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected. In one experiment, people were asked to watch a moving dot in the centre of a computer screen. Without warning, large dots would occasionally be flashed at the edges of the screen. Nearly all participants noticed these large dots.

The experiment was then repeated with a second group of people, who were offered a large financial reward for accurately watching the centre dot, creating more anxiety. They became focused on the centre dot and more than a third of them missed the large dots when they appeared on the screen. The harder they looked, the less they saw.

And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

I wondered whether these four principles could be used to increase the amount of good luck that people encounter in their lives. To find out, I created a "luck school" - a simple experiment that examined whether people's luck can be enhanced by getting them to think and behave like a lucky person.

I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck.

One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. While lucky people became luckier, the unlucky had become lucky. Take Carolyn, whom I introduced at the start of this article. After graduating from "luck school", she has passed her driving test after three years of trying, was no longer accident-prone and became more confident.

In the wake of these studies, I think there are three easy techniques that can help to maximise good fortune:

  • Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell - a reason to consider a decision carefully.
  • Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.
  • Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

quinta-feira, 1 de outubro de 2009

Hipopótamo

Pictured: The baby pygmy hippo who's barely bigger than a lettuce leaf

By Daily Mail Reporter

Hippos kill more humans than any other animal - but this little fellow doesn't look like he could do too much harm.

A newborn baby pygmy from Rotterdam's Blijdorp Zoo, he's dwarfed by lettuce leaves as he has a nibble with his mum.

Much tamer and shyer than their aggressive cousins, pygmy hippos are now critically endangered, with less than 3000 remaining in the wild.

pygmy hippopotamus A newly born pygmy hippopotamus has a nibble with its mother in Rotterdam's Blijdorp Zoo

They're indigenous to the tropical forests of West Africa, and their primary threat is the loss of their forest habitat due to the timber industry. They're also hunted extensively for their meat.

The aptly named pygmy grows to just over 3ft tall - just one fifth of the size of the common hippopotamus - and is the only other species of hippo in the world.

Reclusive and nocturnal, the mammals are semi-aquatic and need to live near water to keep their skin moisturised and their body cool.

They sometimes even mate and give birth in water, and they secrete oils known as 'blood-sweat' to keep their hide waterproof.

Pygmy hippos are plant-eating mammals, feeding on ferns, broad-leaved plants, grasses and fruits they find in the forest.