Science & TechnologyS


Sun

Best of the Web: Electric Universe: Which Came First?

Donald Scott
thunderbolts.info
Fri, 24 Jun 2011 19:14 UTC
sun
© Jo DahlmansA coronal mass ejection erupts from the Sun.

Electric currents create magnetic fields in the Sun.

"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Asking this question always gets a chuckle from a group of kids who haven't been asked that before. For adults, it confirms their conviction that unanswerable questions must be laughably ignored. For a farmer who gets into the egg business by purchasing a group of laying hens the answer is easy. "My chickens came first; that's how I got my eggs."

Solar astrophysicists who try to explain what causes coronal mass ejections (CMEs) have a similar conundrum: "Which came first, the change in electric current, or the change in the solar magnetic field?" Until the present day there has been no mention of electric currents in space by solar astronomers. There has been no acknowledgement whatever that electric current is needed to create magnetic fields or that it even exists.

In 1908 Kristian Birkeland suggested that electrical flows from the Sun caused the auroral displays that we see. Astronomers such as Sidney Chapman ridiculed him. When it came to descriptions of solar coronal mass ejections and similar phenomena, all we have heard about for decades was that magnetic fields move around and twist - their "magnetic lines of force" come together, touch, and then fly apart carrying matter with them. This is called "Magnetic Reconnection." Solar astronomers never mention electric currents. We are to believe that magnetic fields do it all by themselves, without help.
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Better Earth

Lynch: Much going on in the direction of Vega

Mike Lynch
Times Record News
Fri, 24 Jun 2011 18:30 UTC
Image
© WikipediaVega
As soon as it is dark enough in the evening - and that is past a lot of bedtimes this time of year - you can see a really bright star in the eastern skies. It's the star Vega. Most people pronounce it like the ill-fated Chevrolet car of the 1970s, but others insist that you pronounce it VEE-ga. However you pronounce it, Vega is a significant star, not so much because of the star itself but because of where it is in our night sky.

Vega is the brightest star in what's called the "Summer Triangle" that was featured last week in this column, and it's also the brightest star in Lyra - the Lyre or Harp - a small constellation that I'll talk more about next month in Starwatch. It's one of the brighter stars in our sky, the third brightest we see from North Texas.
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2 + 2 = 4

SOTT Focus: Is the Sun Part of a Binary Star System? - Six Reasons to Consider

Ryan X
Sott.net
Fri, 24 Jun 2011 09:51 UTC
Lost Star and Myth of Time
© Binary Research Institute
Just what is the real cause behind the precession of the equinoxes and why did the ancients believe this cycle was so important? Walter Cruttenden asks this question in his latest book Lost Star of Myth and Time and comes to some provocative conclusions.

To the layman, the precession of the equinoxes is the observed motion of the night sky shifting backwards by a small amount every year. Of course, the night sky continuously shifts throughout the year as the Earth orbits around the Sun, but if one were to take a fixed point in time (like the Vernal Equinox, for instance) and take a snapshot of the sky on that day every year, one would notice the sky slowly shifting backwards with each progressing year. This is what is meant by the precession of the zodiac, or precessional movement. Astrologers would say we are in a different 'age' or zodiac sign depending on which constellations are visible in the sky on the Vernal Equinox of a particular year. This precessional movement of the sky amounts to about 50 arc seconds per year and takes about 24,000-26,000 years to complete a full cycle; the "great year" or "great world cycle" as it is often called.

Sir Isaac Newton was the first to put forth the idea that this precession is due to a wobbly motion of the Earth's axis, and few scientists have challenged this assumption since Newton's time. Cruttenden dares to ask the most basic question about this in his book bringing together a number of clues to form a hypothesis for precession being the result of the Sun moving in a binary orbit about a companion star. Could Cruttenden's speculations really lead to data that could overturn the ideas of Newton - a man treated like a deity in the world of physics and astronomy? As we'll see below, there's actually a large body of evidence to support Cruttenden's ideas.
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Beaker

Should we clone Neanderthals?

Andrew Brown
Guardian.co.uk
Fri, 24 Jun 2011 02:22 UTC
Given reliable technology, could it ever be ethical to bring our prehistoric relatives back from the dead?
Image
© Action Press /Rex FeaturesCloning Neanderthals ... 'No one would want to be the only member of their species'.

I am at a conference in Dubai on science, religion and modernity, and the best question to come up was "should we clone Neanderthals?" Let's assume the kind of technical progress which would make this look like a possibly ethical thing to do: the failure rate with mammalian cloning has been so high that it really would be rather dodgy to inflict the process on a human being. But for the sake of argument assume a reliable technology and a sufficiency of DNA to work with.

Of course, the first difficulty from the strictly utilitarian point of view is that we don't know what the consequences would be. Neanderthal brains were physically different from ours and we have no idea how that impacted their consciousness. We assume they had speech, but this is obviously something that does not fossilise. So it's hard to judge the consequences inflicted on a sentient being when we have no clear idea of what kind of sentience is involved.

So a straightforward calculation of the likely consequences can't be done in the way that it can at least be attempted in bioethical questions as they affect homo sapiens. That doesn't mean that religion can provide answers, either. I haven't asked a Roman Catholic but assume that they would apply the same kind of precautionary principle as is applied in the case of abortion: that something which might be a human being should always be given the benefit of the doubt. But other religions, and other forms of Christianity, are not opposed to human cloning. They might not be opposed to cloning Neanderthals.
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Info

The Flames of Betelgeuse - New Image Reveals Vast Nebula Around Famous Supergiant star


European Southern Observatory
Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:05 UTC
Betelgeuse
© ESO

Using the VISIR instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have imaged a complex and bright nebula around the supergiant star Betelgeuse in greater detail than ever before. This structure, which resembles flames emanating from the star, is formed as the behemoth sheds its material into space.

Betelgeuse, a red supergiant in the constellation of Orion, is one of the brightest stars in the night sky. It is also one of the biggest, being almost the size of the orbit of Jupiter -- about four and half times the diameter of the Earth's orbit. The VLT image shows the surrounding nebula, which is much bigger than the supergiant itself, stretching 60 billion kilometres away from the star's surface -- about 400 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun.

Red supergiants like Betelgeuse represent one of the last stages in the life of a massive star. In this short-lived phase, the star increases in size, and expels material into space at a tremendous rate -- it sheds immense quantities of material (about the mass of the Sun) in just 10 000 years.
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Einstein

Blue Light Enables Genes to Turn On


Physorg
Fri, 24 Jun 2011 13:55 UTC
Lights and Genes
© Science / AAASCustom-designed LED arrays and LED-coupled optical fibre devices used for blue light triggered transgene expression in mammalian cells grown subcutaneously into mice.
Medical Xpress -- With a combination of synthetic biology and optogenetics, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology published a paper in Science outlining their new technique which enables certain genes to be turned on simply by the switch of a light.

Optogenetics uses genetics and different optical methods to create and activate cells in living tissue with the use of light. Synthetic biology combines science and engineering to create new biological functions that are not found naturally.

Led by synthetic biologist Martin Fussenegger, the team used melanopsin which is a molecule that is found on neurons within the retina and is light sensitive. These molecules are responsible for keeping the biological clocks synchronized with day and night. When light hits these molecules, the melanopsin stimulates a molecular change that causes in influx of calcium ions and an electrical pulse.
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Telescope

Astronomers Discover That Galaxies Are Either Asleep or Awake


Science Daily
Fri, 24 Jun 2011 11:05 UTC
Galaxies sleep awake
© NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF teamBluer galaxies are actively "awake" and forming stars, while redder galaxies have shut down and are "asleep."

Astronomers have probed into the distant universe and discovered that galaxies display one of two distinct behaviors: they are either awake or asleep, actively forming stars or are not forming any new stars at all.

Scientists have known for several years that galaxies in the nearby universe seem to fall into one of these two states. But a new survey of the distant universe shows that even very young galaxies as far away as 12 billion light years are either awake or asleep as well, meaning galaxies have behaved this way for more than 85 percent of the history of the universe. (Looking at galaxies farther away is like looking back in time when they were much younger, because of how long it takes the light they emit to reach us here on Earth.)

"The fact that we see such young galaxies in the distant universe that have already shut off is remarkable," said Kate Whitaker, a Yale University graduate student and lead author of the paper, which is published in the June 20 online edition of the Astrophysical Journal.
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Magnify

Iceman's Stomach Sampled - Filled With Goat Meat

Ker Than
National Geographic News
Thu, 23 Jun 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© Vienna Report Agency/Sygma/CorbisThe 5,000-year-old mummy known as the Iceman was found in the Italian Alps in 1991.
Missing until 2009, mummy's stomach found to contain lumps of last meal.

Hours before he died, "Ötzi" the Iceman gorged on the fatty meat of a wild goat, according to a new analysis of the famous mummy's stomach contents.

The frozen body of the Copper Age hunter was discovered in 1991 in the Alps of northern Italy, where he died some 5,000 years ago.

The circumstances surrounding Ötzi's death are not fully known, but the most popular theory - based in part on the discovery of an arrowhead in his back - is that he was murdered by other hunters while fleeing through the mountains.

Scientists previously analyzed the contents of Ötzi's lower intestine and determined that he ate a meal of grains along with possibly cooked red deer and goat meat up to 30 hours before his death.

But attempts using an endoscopic tool to sample Ötzi's stomach were unsuccessful.

The reason for the failure became clear in 2009, when scientists studying CAT scans of Ötzi discovered that the Iceman's stomach had shifted upward after death, to where the lower part of his lungs would normally be.

"Why it moved upward, we don't know," said Frank Maixner, a microbiologist at the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, who was involved in the new investigation.
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Sun

We Could Be Due for a Massive Solar Storm in 2011

Amy Rolph
Seattle PI: Big Blog
Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:36 UTC
Image
© NASAA solar flare in 2002.
The last time the sun erupted into a massive solar storm, the year was 1859. Northern Lights appeared over Cuba and Hawaii, and electrical currents from the blast set telegraph offices on fire.

But that was then. Scientists and government officials are worried a modern-day solar storm of the same proportion could wreak havoc on Earth, crippling communications and paralyzing power grids.

Massive solar storms, resulting in huge coronal mass ejections, usually happen just before the sun goes through a quiet phase. NASA officials announced earlier this week that we're poised to enter a below-average solar cycle soon, giving weight to concerns about how Earth would weather a solar storm like the one that happened in 1859.

"A similar storm today might knock us for a loop," said NASA physicist Lika Guhathakurta in a prepared statement. "Modern society depends on high-tech systems such as smart power grids, GPS, and satellite communications - all of which are vulnerable to solar storms."
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Sun

Scientists See Sunspot Hibernation But No Ice Age

Deborah Zabarenko
Reuters
Thu, 16 Jun 2011 11:49 UTC
Image
© Reuters/NASAAn image of the sun taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft on June 15, 2011.
Washington - Sunspot cycles -- those 11-year patterns when dark dots appear on the solar surface -- may be delayed or even go into "hibernation" for a while, a U.S. scientist said on Wednesday.

But contrary to some media reports, this does not mean a new Ice Age is coming, Frank Hill of the National Solar Observatory said in a telephone interview.

"We have not predicted a Little Ice Age," Hill said, speaking from an astronomical meeting in New Mexico. "We have predicted something going on with the Sun."

The appearance of sunspots helps predict solar storms that can interfere with satellite communications and power grids.

Hill and other scientists cited a missing jet stream, fading spots and slower activity near the Sun's poles as signs that our nearest star is heading into a rest period.

"This is highly unusual and unexpected," he said in a statement released on Tuesday. "But the fact that three completely different views of the Sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation."
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