Science & TechnologyS


Info

Luminous Sand Reveals Historic Record-Breaking Storm

Netherlands Beach
© Marcel A.J. Bakker, TNO Geological Survey of the NetherlandsFrothy water surges on a Netherlands beach.

Using the natural luminosity of sand grains, researchers have discovered that a record-breaking flood hit the Dutch coast in either 1775 or 1776.

The finding reveals a new way to look back in time at extreme weather events. Measurements of floods, storm surges and other phenomena didn't begin in earnest until the late 1800s. That makes it hard for scientists to track whether weather is becoming more severe, and it also makes it difficult to predict worst-case scenarios for an area.

To go back further in time, researchers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands examined a layer of beach dune sand exposed by a storm in 2007. They sampled buried sand grains from the layer and conducted an analysis called optical stimulated luminescence to find out how long ago the sand had been laid down.

Optical stimulated luminescence takes advantage of the fact that low levels of background radiation are everywhere. Sediment absorbs this radiation, but when sand is exposed to the sun, that radiation "leaks" out, resetting the radiation level to zero. Using a special light wavelength, researchers can stimulate similar radiation "leaks" in the lab, measuring how much radiation comes out of the sand grains over time. The result is a measurement of how long it's been since the sediment last saw sunlight.

Bizarro Earth

Super-Volcano Trigger Found

Tuvurvur volcano
© Wikimedia CommonsTuvurvur volcano - part of Rabaul Caldera – Papua New Guinea.

Super-volcanoes are the worst natural disaster the Earth can face, besides a meteor strike, said Patricia Gregg, a post-doc at Oregon State University and lead author of a study that may have found what triggers the massive eruptions.

Luckily, super-volcanoes only devastate the planet ever 100,000 years or so. But why they erupt has had scientists stumped, since they aren't like their puny cousins, the regular volcano, which are triggered by internal precursor eruptions.

But there seems to be no internal precursor to a super-volcano eruption. The trigger comes from above.

"Instead of taking the evidence in these eruptions at face value, most models have simply taken small historic eruptions and tried to scale the process up to super-volcanic proportions," said Shanaka de Silva, an OSU geologist and co-author of the study, in a press release.

"Those of us who actually study these phenomena have known for a long time that these eruptions are not simply scaled-up Mt. Mazamas or Krakataus - the scaling is non-linear. The evidence is clear," said de Silva.

Info

Bible's Authors Decoded by Computer

The Bible
© Discovery NewsA new algorithm analyzes the text of the Bible to try and decipher its authors.
A group of Israeli researchers has built a computer algorithm to decode one of the most important books in Western culture: the Bible.

No, it isn't The Da Vinci Code, nor is there some secret prophecy. What they did build is a method of figuring out what style different parts of the Christian Old Testament, or Pentateuch, were written in.

That doesn't tell you how many authors wrote it, but since the two differing styles the team found -- priestly and non-priestly -- accord generally with the consensus of scholars, it shows that those differences aren't a coincidence.

The algorithm compares sets of synonyms (called synsets) in blocks of text, along with "function" words (such as prepositions). It then looks at the distribution of the most common words in the Bible. By finding sets that are similar in any two blocks it can group them according to the style they are written in.

The synonyms were identified using Hebrew roots that were translated the same way in the King James version, (based largely on the work of the 19th century scholar James Strong).

Beaker

Ionic Liquid Helps Turn Greenhouse Gas Into Fuel

A research team at the University of Illinois claims to have developed an ionic liquid to act as a catalyst when greenhouse gas emissions are converted to fuel.
Image
© Unknown

Using the liquid, the scientists were able to dramatically reduce the energy needed to change carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, which is the first step in turning emissions into fuels such as formic acid or methanol.

The idea isn't new and is generally knows as artificial photosynthesis, where a solar cell or wind turbine powers an electrochemical cell to convert carbon monoxide. So far, however, scientists needed more energy for the conversion from carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide than can be gained from the final product. According to the research team led by chemical and biological engineering professor and chair Paul Kenis, the ionic liquids stabilize the intermediates in the reaction, which lowers the need for electricity for the conversion. Kenis and his team did not reveal how much the need dropped, but said that they are now looking into ways to make the conversion more efficient and accelerate it so that their ionic liquid can be used in commercial applications.

"More work is needed, but this research brings us a significant step closer to reducing our dependence on fossil fuels while simultaneously reducing CO2 emissions that are linked to unwanted climate change," Kenis said.

Blackbox

Black Death Is 'Grandmother' of All Modern Plague

Black Death
© Museum of LondonDental pulp taken from Black Death victims, like these, excavated from the East Smithfield cemetery in London, allowed scientists to sequence the genome of the bacterium that is believed to have killed them about 660 years ago.

The bacterium blamed for the Black Death that wiped out more than a third of Europe's population within about five years of the 14th century looks an awful lot like the modern versions of the plague-causing bug, new genetic research indicates.

By taking the now-powdery black pulp out of the teeth of plague victims buried in London's East Smithfield Cemetery - a cemetery established solely to handle the onslaught of the Black Death once it arrived in the city in 1348 - researchers have managed to reconstruct the entire genetic blueprint, or genome, of the bacterium blamed for the devastation.

Since science already have the same information for modern strains of plague bacteria, this gave the researchers the chance to explore perplexing questions about plague.

In fact, all modern, human-infecting strains appear to have separated from a common ancestor shortly before the Black Death, making the medieval bacterium the grandmother of modern plague, as one of the researchers said.

Still, the genetic similarity between bacteria leaves the big question: Why does modern plague, while deadly without antibiotics, pale in comparison to the devastation and wildfire-like spread of the Black Death?

Since genetic changes don't appear to explain this change in behavior, the researchers suggest an alternative: The 14th-century bug hit at a time when Europeans were already down. They were living in a cold, wet period that caused crops to fail, and they were most likely already struggling with other diseases.

Comment: The reader is encouraged to review this in-depth article that sheds more light on this subject: New Light on the Black Death: The Cosmic Connection by Laura Knight-Jadczyk.


Black Cat

UFO-Like Stealth Drone Soars in U.S. Navy Test Flight

Military drones have already begun edging out manned fighter jets and bombers over the past decade, and the U.S. Navy doesn't plan on being left behind. Its vision for unmanned aerial warfare includes a tailless robotic aircraft resembling a UFO that is scheduled to begin landing on aircraft carriers in 2013. As a step toward that goal, the X-47B drone recently made its first flight in cruise mode with retracted landing gear.

The Navy has enlisted the X-47B drone - a Northrop Grumman design with a stealthy profile - as more than just its very first carrier-based drone. It also wants to use the X-47B as a test platform for autonomous aerial refueling without human assistance in 2014.

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© US NAVYX-47B stealth drone

Telescope

Astronomers Identify Distant Ancient Supernovas

Exploding stars called supernovas are the source of iron, essential to life on Earth. Now Tel Aviv University researchers are watching stars that exploded ten billion years ago, sharpening our understanding of these stars and their role in the formation of these elements.

Prof. Dan Maoz of TAU's Raymond and Beverly Sackler School of Physics and Astronomy is spearheading a project that has just discovered twelve of the most distant and ancient supernovas ever seen, ten of them in a part of the sky called the Subaru Deep Field. He and his colleagues say that their discovery will enhance their knowledge of the "dark energy" that is causing the universe to expand, as well as the origins of life on our own planet.

Image
© NASA, The Hubble Heritage Team and A. Riess (STScI) Intricate spiral arms contain areas of new star formation in this dusty galaxy. This galaxy, which lies about 100 million light-years away, toward the direction of the constellation Leo, was home to a supernova that appeared in 1994.

Telescope

The Milky Way Arches Over Chile

The Milky Way arches across this rare 360-degree panorama of the night sky above the Paranal observing platform in Chile, home of ESO's Very Large Telescope.

The image was made from 37 individual frames with a total exposure time of about 30 minutes, taken in the early morning hours. The Moon is just rising and the zodiacal light shines above it, while the Milky Way stretches across the sky opposite the observatory.

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© ESO/H.H. Heyer

Blackbox

Kraken Discovery; Science or a Whopper of a Fish Tale?

Image
© UnknownGiant Squid
A paleontologist observing a pattern of prehistoric bones from a bus-sized ancestor of the modern sperm whale has come up with a whopper of a fish tale. Analyzing the arrangement of the bones has led to the theory that a giant mythical monster known as the Kraken dined on the whale-like creature, picked it down to the bones and methodically laid the bones in a systematic fashion.

So does this mean the Kraken lives? Well, not exactly. The existence of the Kraken has never been proven, but one scientist says he might know where it lived. More accurately, one paleontologist is speculating it lived and thinks he has stumbled upon its home. Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin says he has found evidence that he says lends credibility to the mythical creature known in Norse Mythology as the Kraken.

They did not actually find Kraken remains. Giant squid do not have bones and most of their bodies are composed of soft tissue and decay quite rapidly. This makes the study of this creature so elusive. The evidence is at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada, where McMenamin and his daughter conducted field studies over the past few months. It's a site where the remains of nine 45-foot ichthyosaurs have been discovered. The Ichthyosaur was known to be a whale-like creature that swam not only on the top of the water (air-breathing), but also at the top of the food chain. That theory is now being challenged by the discovery of evidence that giant Kraken feasted on the mighty leviathans, making them the king of the sea.

Saturn

Saturn's rings tell a comet's tale

Image
© NASA
Ripples testify to 14th century collision

During the 1300s, the Black Death was savaging Europe, England and France were locked in the Hundred Years' War and Chaucer was penning his Canterbury Tales. Meanwhile, more than a billion kilometers away, a comet careened toward Saturn and disintegrated, dropping dusty clouds of debris on the giant planet's iconic rings, creating rippled cometary footprints.

The ripples from that cataclysmic event can still be detected today, electrical engineer Essam Marouf reported October 4 during the joint meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences.

Marouf, a professor at San Jose State University in California and a member of the Cassini science team, described how the probe beamed radio waves back to Earth through the innermost part of Saturn's C ring, a tenuous inner band in the planet's ring system. The radio waves revealed what Marouf calls a "very unusual kind of addition" to the normal ring structure. "There were highly regular little wiggles that rippled over hundreds of kilometers in a very specific pattern," Marouf says.