Science & TechnologyS


2 + 2 = 4

Tornado - A Natural Charged Sheath Vortex

Peter Thomson
peter-thomson.co.uk
Tue, 01 Jan 2002 00:00 UTC

Comment: Please note that due to the age of the article many of the videos originally linked to are now missing from the web.


tornado 12
© Unknown

There are many conventional theories that seek to explain the development of a tornado. Without exception they cannot explain the complex internal structure and energy flows in a simple and logical manner.

Tornados show a remarkably complex coherent structure, and the existence of rope like tornadoes, tornadoes that kink and reform, and the nature of the ejection zone at the tornado base all require, and can be simply explained if air with or without particles can be shown to exist in a form that has both shear and tensile strength.

The charged sheath vortex theory can explain the formation of the tornado in a very simple and elegant way. It predicts the complex physical structure and electrical properties of the tornado. It explains the simple basis for many tornado 'anomalies' and also makes predictions about the structure of the tornado that may not yet have been observed.

A vortex is produced by a spinning mass of air (or other gas or dust cloud), but there are two different types of vortex in the air circulation that we call a tornado with very distinct properties.
Read More...
Sherlock

How detectives investigating serial killers use the same tricks as scientists tracking an epidemic

Lee Moran
DailyMail.co.uk
Fri, 27 May 2011 11:11 UTC
Savage diseases and serial killers may appear to strike randomly. But the twin terrors could have much more in common than first thought - as both have been found to hunt and kill their victims in a predictable pattern.

It means the tricks used by detectives in tracking down serial killers, like Suffolk Strangler Steve Wright, can now also be used by scientists to pinpoint the location where an epidemic started. When tracking serial killers, such as the Suffolk Strangler Steve Wright who killed five prostitutes in the Ipswich area in 2006, police create a 'geographic profile' showing where their victims were found.
Image
© PAFred West

Image
© PASuffolk Strangler Steve Wright

Most serial killers prey on people close to home because it is too expensive and difficult to travel far away from where they live. But they rarely target their close neighbours.

By processing these three key pieces of information, detectives can hone in on where the killer lives. The exception to this was Fred West who, alongside wife Rosemary, between 1967 and 1987, raped and murdered at least 12 young women and girls. Many of the crimes took place at their homes, in Gloucester.
Read More...
Beaker

Scientists Detect Earth Equivalent Amount of Water Within the Moon


Science Daily
Thu, 26 May 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© Saal lab, Brown UniversityScientists at Brown University found super-tiny melt inclusions in lunar soil samples that opened the door for measurements that revealed the magnitude of water inside the moon.
There is water inside the moon -- so much, in fact, that in some places it rivals the amount of water found within Earth.

The finding from a scientific team including Brown University comes from the first-ever measurements of water in lunar melt inclusions. Those measurements show that some parts of the lunar mantle have as much water as Earth's upper mantle.

Lunar melt inclusions are tiny globules of molten rock trapped within crystals that are found in volcanic glass deposits formed during explosive eruptions. The new finding, published this week in Science Express, shows lunar magma water contents 100 times higher than previous studies have suggested.

The result is the culmination of years of investigation by the team searching for water and other volatiles in volcanic glasses returned by NASA Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In a paper in Nature in 2008, the same team led by Alberto Saal, associate professor of geological sciences at Brown, reported the first evidence for the presence of water and used models to estimate how much water was originally in the magmas before eruption.
Read More...
Info

Get Rid of NASA Completely, Says Apollo Astronaut

Natalie Wolchover
Space
Thu, 26 May 2011 21:21 UTC
Image
© unknownHarrison Schmitt
NASA should be scrapped in favor of a new agency, one with the sole objective of furthering America's exploration of deep space. So says Harrison Schmitt, the last man to set foot on the moon, in a proposal published online today (May 25).

Schmitt, a member of Apollo 17 in 1972 and later a one-term U.S. senator, proposed that the new space agency be called the National Space Exploration Administration.

Fifty years after John F. Kennedy's famous speech that set America on its glorious path to the moon, Schmitt, 75, said NASA has lost its focus. The Apollo program helped win the Cold War, strengthened national unity and set up the United States to take control of lunar resources, but NASA has withered under later presidencies, including Barack Obama's, Schmitt said.

"I don't blame NASA as much as I blame various administrations for not recognizing the geopolitical importance of space," he told SPACE.com. [Video: President Kennedy's Moonshot Moment]
Read More...
Telescope

Scouring Space for Life: More Earths Out There than We Thought?

Michael D. Lemonick
Time
Tue, 24 May 2011 18:53 UTC
Image
Planet hunting is by far the hottest area of astronomy these days, and just about everyone who's in on the search is looking for the same thing: a distant world where life could exist, at least in theory. That means a world more or less the size of Earth, orbiting its parent star in the habitable zone - the location, just the right distance away from its sun's heat, where water can exist in liquid form. Size or distance alone aren't good enough: an Earth-size planet that's too hot or too cold probably couldn't support life, and a giant gasbag like Jupiter couldn't either, even if its temperature were ideal.
Read More...
Info

Did Quiet Sun Cause Little Ice Age After All?

Govert Schilling
ScienceNow
Thu, 26 May 2011 12:44 UTC
Ice Age
© Hendrick Avercamp / Wikimedia CommonsBrrr ... Cold winters in 17th century Europe, as shown in this painting by Hendrick Avercamp, may have been caused by a lack of solar activity after all.

Boston - For decades, astronomers and climatologists have debated whether a prolonged 17th century cold spell, best documented in Europe, could have been caused by erratic behavior of the sun. Now, an American solar physicist says he has new evidence to suggest that the sun was indeed the culprit.

The sun isn't as constant as it appears. Instead, its surface is regularly beset by storms of swirling magnetic fields. As a result, like a teenager plagued with acne, the face of the sun often sprouts relatively dark and short-lived "sunspots," which appear when strong magnetic fields inhibit the upwelling of hotter gas from below. The number of those spots waxes and wanes regularly in an 11-year cycle. However, even that cycle isn't immutable.

In 1893, English astronomer Edward Maunder, studying historical records, noted that the cycle essentially stopped between 1645 and 1715. Instead, the sun was almost devoid of sunspots during this period. In 1976, American solar physicist John "Jack" Eddy suggested there might have been a causal link between this "Maunder Minimum" in the number of sunspots and the contemporaneous Little Ice Age, when average temperatures in Europe were a degree centigrade lower than normal.
Read More...
Info

Hubble Finds "Oddball" Stars in Milky Way Hub

Jason Major
Universe Today
Wed, 25 May 2011 17:40 UTC
Straggler
© NASA, ESA, W. Clarkson (Indiana University and UCLA), and K. Sahu (STScI)
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope to peer deep into the central bulge of our galaxy have found a population of rare and unusual stars. Dubbed "blue stragglers", these stars seem to defy the aging process, appearing to be much younger than they should be considering where they are located. Previously known to exist within ancient globular clusters, blue stragglers have never been seen inside our galaxy's core - until now.

The stars were discovered following a seven-day survey in 2006 called SWEEPS - the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search - that used Hubble to search a section of the central portion of our Milky Way galaxy, looking for the presence of Jupiter-sized planets transiting their host stars. During the search, which examined 180,000 stars, Hubble spotted 42 blue stragglers.

Of the 42 it's estimated that 18 to 37 of them are genuine.

What makes blue stragglers such an unusual find? For one thing, stars in the galactic hub should appear much older and cooler... aging Sun-like stars and old red dwarfs. Scientists believe that the central bulge of the Milky Way stopped making new stars billions of years ago. So what's with these hot, blue, youthful-looking "oddballs"? The answer may lie in their formation.
Read More...
Info

What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters

Tom Simonite
Te
Wed, 25 May 2011 16:39 UTC
Bitcoin
© Technology Review, MIT

Recent weeks have been exciting for a relatively new kind of currency speculator. In just three weeks, the total value of a unique new digital currency called Bitcoin has jumped four times, to over $40 million.

Bitcoin is underwritten not by a government, but by a clever cryptographic scheme.

For now, little can be bought with bitcoins, and the new currency is still a long way from competing with the dollar. But this explainer lays out what Bitcoin is, why it matters, and what needs to happen for it to succeed.

Where does Bitcoin come from?

In 2008, a programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto - a name believed to be an alias - posted a paper outlining Bitcoin's design to a cryptography e-mail list. Then, in early 2009, he (or she) released software that can be used to exchange bitcoins using the scheme. That software is now maintained by a volunteer open-source community coordinated by four core developers.

"Satoshi's a bit of a mysterious figure," says Jeff Garzik, a member of that core team and founder of Bitcoin Watch, which tracks the Bitcoin economy. "I and the other core developers have occasionally corresponded with him by e-mail, but it's always a crapshoot as to whether he responds," says Garzik. "That and the forum are the entirety of anyone's experience with him."
Read More...
Cloud Lightning

Surprise!: Live Bacteria Help Create Rain, Snow & Hail


Live Science
Tue, 24 May 2011 14:46 UTC
Bacteria Hail
© NOAA Photo Library, NOAA Central Library; OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL)Large hail collects on streets and grass during severe thunderstorm. Larger stones appear to be nearly 2 to 3 inches in diameter.

Living bacteria that get whipped up into the sky may be just the spark needed for rain, snow and even hailstorms, research now finds.

Alexander Michaud of Montana State University in Bozeman, Mont., found large amounts of bacteria at the centers of giant hailstones.

Traditionally, researchers have thought that minerals or other particulates in clouds caused water droplets to glom together until they were large enough to fall as raindrops, snowflakes and hail. The new research shows that a large variety of bacteria, and even fungi, diatoms and algae, persist in the clouds and can be used as precipitation starters, a growing field of study called bioprecipitation. (In order for snow, say, to fall from clouds, particles around which ice crystals can form - called ice nuclei - are needed.)

"Minerals were thought to be the dominant ice nucleators in the atmosphere, but they aren't nearly as active as biological particles," said Brent Christner, a microbiologist studying bioprecipitation at Louisiana State University who is presenting the work today (May 24) at the General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans.
Read More...
Telescope

Nearby Supernova Factory Ramps Up


NASA
Tue, 24 May 2011 17:37 UTC
Image
© NASA
A local supernova factory has recently started production, according to a wealth of new data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory on the Carina Nebula. This discovery may help astronomers better understand how some of the Galaxy's heaviest and youngest stars race through their lives and release newly-forged elements into their surroundings.

Located in the Sagittarius-Carina arm of the Milky Way a mere 7,500 light years from Earth, the Carina Nebula has long been a favorite target for astronomers using telescopes tuned to a wide range of wavelengths. Chandra's extraordinarily sharp X-ray vision has detected over 14,000 stars in this region, revealed a diffuse X-ray glow, and provided strong evidence that supernovas have already occurred in this massive complex of young stars.

"The Carina Nebula is one of the best places we know to study how young massive stars live and die," said Leisa Townsley of Penn State University, who led the large Chandra campaign to observe Carina. "Now, we have a compelling case that a supernova show in Carina has already begun."

One important piece of evidence is an observed deficit of bright X-ray sources in Trumpler 15, one of ten star clusters in the Carina complex.

"This suggests that some of the massive stars in Trumpler 15 have already been destroyed in supernova explosions," said Junfeng Wang of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass, first author of a paper on this cluster. "These stars were likely between 20 and 40 times the mass of the Sun and would have exploded in the last few million years, which is very recent in cosmic terms."
Read More...