December 26, 2011

Good Morning,

A Chinese train company is currently testing its new high-speed cars, which generate over twice as much power as its predecessor. Read the third article for more details including the almost incompressible speed the train will potentially obtain.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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Genome of Mongols sequenced in China

BEIJING - Chinese scientists say they have completed the first sequencing of the Mongolian genome, allowing for a better understanding of Mongols' evolutionary history. Mongol is a central Asian ethnic group mostly inhabiting Mongolia, the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia in China, and the Buryatia republic in Russia, totaling about 10 million ethnic Mongol people. The "Mongol Empire" was commonly referred to in the 13th and 14th centuries as the "largest contiguous empire" in the world history. It has stretched its territory from the Yellow Sea in eastern Asia to the borders of eastern Europe under the leadership of Genghis Khan and his descendants, a release from the genomics organization BGI Shenzen said. The movement and migration of Mongols in Eurasia, including China, the Middle East and Russia during the period of the Mongol Empire has always been debated by scientists, and the genome sequencing will provide new insights to their potential impact on the human evolution at the genetic level, researchers said. The genome was sequenced from a DNA sample from a male adult who belongs to the Mongolian "Royal Family" and is the 34th generation descendant of Genghis Khan, they said. "With the completion of the first Mongolian genome, we believe that the genomics study of Mongolian will help us to explore the distinctive features of Mongolian and the genetic differences with other ethnic groups, including the medical genetics and incidence of genetic diseases," Ye Yin, Director of Research at BGI, said.


Global drop in groundwater levels seen

IRVINE, Calif. - U.S. researchers say gravity-monitoring satellites have recorded drops in groundwater levels in many places across the globe during the past nine years. Scientists at the University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling in Irvine said water has been disappearing beneath southern Argentina, western Australia and stretches of the United States, ScienceNews.org reported Thursday. The findings raise concerns farmers are pumping too much water out of the ground in dry regions, researchers said. "Groundwater is being depleted at a rapid clip in virtually of all of the major aquifers in the world's arid and semiarid regions," hydrologist Jay Famiglietti said. The drop is especially severe in parts of California, India, the Middle East and China, where expanding agriculture has increased water demand, the researchers said. "People are using groundwater faster than it can be naturally recharged," Matthew Rodell, a hydrologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said. Current water use in many areas has become unsustainable, another researcher said. "There are too many areas in the world where groundwater development far exceeds a sustainable level," Leonard Konikow, a hydrogeologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said. "Something will have to change."


China starts testing 300 mph train

BEIJING - China's largest train manufacturer says it has begun testing a train capable of speeds of up to 310 miles per hour. CSR Corp. Ltd. said it has tested the six-car train with a streamlined engine carrying testing and data processing facilities, China's state-run news agency Xinhua reported Monday. The newest of CSR's CRH series, the train has a maximum tractive power of 22,800 kilowatts, compared with 9,600 kilowatts for the CRH380 trains currently in service on the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway, the company said. The CRH380 currently holds the world speed record for trains of 186 mph. An ancient Chinese sword inspired the streamlined shape of the new train, CSR chief technician Ding Sansan said. The bodywork uses plastic materials reinforced with carbon fiber.


Web pages suffering 'bloat,' getting big

SAN FRANCISCO - Web pages, like a lot of people, are having a weight problem and are showing a sharp growth in size, a U.S. based Internet tracking organization says. A study of top sites by the HTTP Archive in San Francisco found the average Web page is now about 965 kilobytes in size, up 33 percent from 2010 when the average page was 726 kilobytes. User demands for more images and interactivity as well as the tools used to track what happens when people visit a site are likely causes for the increase, experts said. Large pages could take too long to load, leaving people frustrated and likely to go elsewhere, freelance Web developer Anna Debenham told the BBC. However, there are ways to shrink the size of a Web page and ensure it loaded quickly, she said. "There's always room for some optimization," she said, but added many Web developers are self-taught and relatively few are well-versed in techniques to reduce page sizes. Slimmed-down Web pages will become more and more necessary as more people browse the Web on mobile devices, she said. "We've had a bit of a lull where we all thought everyone was using fast broadband," she said. "But now we are almost back to where we were with dial-up because mobile speeds are so slow."

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