Women's backs are built for pregancy (but still ache anyway)

A scientific comparison between of the lower backs of women and men has shown that women's backs are specially built for carrying the extra weight of pregnancy. Similar studies on our evolutionary ancestors bore the same result.

When human ancestors changed from walking on four legs to two, the bones and muscles of their spines had to evolve to accommodate the shift in weight. The lower spine curved, to shift the shoulders back, and keep our center of gravity over our two legs.

The term center of gravity refers to the mathematical average location of an object's weight. When your the center of gravity extends in front of the end of your feet, you fall over. You can experience this for yourself. Stand keeping the back of your feet and hips against a wall, and move your center of gravity forward by bending at the waist. If you do this, you'll know when your center of gravity is beyond the end of your toes.

Because of the extra weight of pregnancy, women's lower backs evolved differently than men's. The curve of a women's lower back spans three vertebrae; in men, it spans just two. The added vertebra helps distribute the pregnancy weight over a wider area. The joints located behind the spinal cord, called zygapophyseal joints, are 14 percent larger in women than in men, suggesting that the joints can bare more weight. These joints are also oriented at a slightly different angle in women, allowing them to better brace the vertebrae against slipping. link

Google thinks like you

PageRank, the computer program that is Google's search formula, works more like our own mind than previously thought.

In a study published in Psychological Science, people were asked to think of a word that begins with a particular letter, and their responses were recorded and ranked by popularity. The Google PageRank result for the letter turned out to be a good predictor of human responses.

When you get the PageRank search results for a search word, what you see is a list of websites associated with that word, ranked by PageRank's website popularity or importance. A web site's importance is determined by how many web pages are linked to the page, and how many web pages are linked to those pages, and so on. Using this method, a seemingly unimportant word can have great notoriety because of it's association with a popular word.

For example, think of the word myrrh. Nobody uses that word much through the year, but it maintains at least moderate importance because of it's link with Christmas, which has a lot of links. link

Clues to water on Mars lie here on Earth

Our everlasting Mars Rovers are still up there sniffing for evidence of Martian water. To better understand what evidence of Martian water looks like, researchers at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio University are studing the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica.

Antartic and Martian dry valleys both experience sub-zero temperatures and both have iron-rich soil. Year round, salt water flows in the ground below the Antartic dry valleys. The topographical similarity between these two regions may be an indication of water under Martian soil; and if so, the prospect of present or past water on Mars looks pretty likely. link

Hurricane season wasn't as bad as expected

For the second year in a row, meteorologists expected a worse Atlantic hurricane season than the one we experienced, and meteorologists are beginning to be concerned that future predictions will not be taken seriously.

The conditions this year were ripe for intense hurricane activity. Seventeen named storms were predicted, but the season only produced 14. Only two of the 14 storms were were extremely intense: hurricanes Dean in August and Felix in September. These storms caused catastrophic damage in Mexico.

Meteorologists are still puzzling over the reason for the lower-than-predicted hurricane rate. It is likely that windblown dust from Africa blocked sunlight and keep water temperatures down near the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

"We are in a time until about 2020 that hurricane threats will be more frequent and more intense on our coastlines. So instead of saying, Ha, ha, ha, there's nothing going on, people should be thankful that there's not as much going on," says Joe Bastardi, a meteorologist with the private weather forecasting service AccuWeather. link