Science & TechnologyS


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Bodies In Motion: Exploring the Human Limits of Future Travel

Lateral Acceleration
© Ollie BlandLateral Acceleration: Going forward too fast is dangerous enough, but a sudden sideways knock can be deadly. Most airplanes’ overhead bins can withstand up to 14 Gs of lateral acceleration, but humans confronted by the same force must either envelop themselves in racecar-style seats or risk having their organs torn loose.

On the morning of October 25, 1999, captain Michael Kling and his first officer, Stephanie Bellegarrigue, piloted a Learjet Model 35 out of Orlando and set a heading for Dallas, where their passengers - the professional golfer Payne Stewart, Stewart's agents Robert Fraley and Van Ardan, and golf-course architect Bruce Borland - were planning to build a new course. The Learjet, a plane often used for such trips, was a marvel of engineering: It could climb 4,340 feet in a minute and cruise at up to 530 mph. In 1976 a similar Lear, the Model 36, set a round-the-world speed record.

As the crew headed north, they received instructions from a Jacksonville controller, first to climb to 26,000 feet, then 39,000. "Three nine zero bravo alpha," the first officer acknowledged. It was her last transmission. A few minutes later, the Learjet leveled out and the controller issued another routine instruction. No one radioed back. The controller tried to reach the crew five more times in the next four and a half minutes.

When a flight crew is unresponsive, the FAA asks that the nearest military jet make a visual assessment - in this case, it was an F-16 pilot on a test run out of nearby Eglin Air Force Base. Coming even with the Learjet, the test pilot reported that both of the plane's engines were running. By all indications, the Learjet was in perfect working order. But the test pilot also reported a disturbing detail: The Learjet's windows were opaque, as if covered from the inside with condensation or ice.

It was becoming clear that in the minutes after Bellegarrigue's last transmission, the cabin had lost pressure and all its oxygen began to escape. Within as little as eight seconds, the crew and their passengers most likely began to experience hypoxia - lack of oxygen in the bloodstream - that impaired their most basic motor and cognitive functions. They may not have even been aware that there was a problem, but within a few minutes of the breach, they were probably dead.

Yet the plane continued on, because a plane does not need its occupants to be comfortable in order to operate. It does not even need them to be breathing.
"You can create a system to do whatever you need it to do. But can you keep a person conscious and alive inside it?"

Arrow Down

Bogus Science claims "Comet Theory Comes Crashing to Earth"


Comment: Most of what the reader will find in this article are misinformed opinions and ad hominem attacks directed at those scientists who have the gall to mention the reality of comet catastrophes. This is not entirely surprising given the attacks that other Catastrophists have endured in the past.

The interested reader may want to compare what's written here to the actual evidence amassed by Firestone, et al. described in this article:

The Younger Dryas Impact Event and the Cycles of Cosmic Catastrophes - Climate Scientists Awakening


Comet Impact
© NSF

An elegant archaeological theory, under fire for results that can't be replicated, may ultimately come undone.

It seemed like such an elegant answer to an age-old mystery: the disappearance of what are arguably North America's first people. A speeding comet nearly 13,000 years ago was the culprit, the theory goes, spraying ice and rocks across the continent, killing the Clovis people and the mammoths they fed on, and plunging the region into a deep chill. The idea so captivated the public that three movies describing the catastrophe were produced.

But now, four years after the purportedly supportive evidence was reported, a host of scientific authorities systematically have made the case that the comet theory is "bogus." Researchers from multiple scientific fields are calling the theory one of the most misguided ideas in the history of modern archaeology, which begs for an independent review so an accurate record is reflected in the literature.

"It is an impossible scenario," says Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., where he taps the world's fastest computers for nuclear bomb experiments to study such impacts. His computations show the debris from such a comet couldn't cover the proposed impact field. In March, a "requiem" for the theory even was published by a group that included leading specialists from archaeology to botany.

Sherlock

Chinese 'Dinosaur City' Reshapes Understanding of Prehistoric Era

Models of dinosaurs in Zhucheng
© Tania Branigan/GuardianModels of dinosaurs in Zhucheng, Shandong province which has become known as 'dinosaur city'.
Troves of early Cretaceous and Jurassic relics in country where palaeontology is just taking off has ignited evolutionary debate

It must have been an awe-inspiring sight: four metres tall and weighing 11 tonnes. Its sharp teeth delivered a bone-crushing bite. Yet even "the tyrant from Zhucheng" reached its inevitable, ignominious end. Over time, half its skull was torn from its skeleton and jumbled with the bones of less imposing creatures at this site in what is now China's eastern Shandong province.

Last month - tens of millions of years later - researchers resurrected Zhuchengtyrannus magnus. Impressive though the reconstruction was, it was just one of a succession of fossil discoveries that have put this "dinosaur city" on the map.

Zhucheng's early Cretaceous relics, Liaoning's feathered dinosaurs and Xinjiang's wealth of Jurassic material are among the Chinese treasure troves reshaping our understanding of ancient life on Earth, and the processes that have created the world around us. "Some of the new material from China is breathtaking," said Dr Paul Barrett, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum. "Firstly, the sheer number of new species is impressive. Secondly, some of the dinosaurs that have been discovered have had major impacts on evolutionary debates."

Bizarro Earth

Cell Phones Caused Mysterious Worldwide Bee Deaths, Study Finds

Bumble bee
© Reuters/Russell CheyneA bumble bee lands on a plant in Pitlochry in Scotland May 29, 2010.

Cellphone transmissions may be responsible for a mysterious, worldwide die off in bees that has mystified scientists.

Dr. Daniel Favre, a former biologist with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, carefully placed a mobile phone underneath a beehive and then monitored the reaction of the workers.

According to a story in The Daily Mail, the bees were able to tell when the handsets were making and receiving calls. They responded by making the high pitched squeaks that usually signal the start of swarming.

"This study shows that the presence of an active mobile phone disturbs bees -- and has a dramatic effect," Favre told the Daily Mail.

Favre believes this to be evidence of something other scientists have suggested: Signals from mobile phones are contributing to the decline of honeybees. Favre thinks more research could help confirm the link between cell signals and "colony collapse disorder" -- the sudden disappearance of entire colonies over winter -- which has halved the bee population, according to some estimates.

Wolf

Not Just a Cute Tail: Female Dogs Aren't Easily Fooled

dog
© Unknown
The battle of the sexes has just heated up - in dogs. A new study finds that when a ball appears to magically change size in front of their eyes, female dogs notice but males don't. The researchers aren't sure what's behind the disparity, but experts say the finding supports the idea that - in some situations - male dogs trust their noses, whereas females trust their eyes.

The study, published online today in Biology Letters, didn't set out to find sex differences. Cognitive biologist Corsin Müller and his colleagues at the University of Vienna and its Clever Dog Lab wanted to find out how good dogs are at size constancy - the ability to recognize that an object shouldn't change size if it disappears for a moment. But they recruited 25 female and 25 male dogs for the study, just to be safe.

Info

Evidence That Cosmic Rays Seed Clouds

Clouds and Sunlight
© Physics World
By firing a particle beam into a cloud chamber, physicists in Denmark and the UK have shown how cosmic rays could stimulate the formation of water droplets in the Earth's atmosphere. The researchers say this is the best experimental evidence yet that the Sun influences the climate by altering the intensity of the cosmic-ray flux reaching the Earth's surface.

The now conventional view on global warming, as stated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is that most of the warming recorded in the past 50 years has been caused by emissions of manmade greenhouse gases. But some scientists argue that the Sun might have a significant influence on changes to the Earth's climate, pointing out that in centuries past there has been a close correlation between global temperatures and solar activity.

However, changes to the Sun's brightness are believed to have altered temperatures on Earth by no more than a few hundredths of a degree in the last 150 years. Researchers have therefore been investigating ways that the Sun could indirectly modify the Earth's climate, and one hypothesis, put forward by Henrik Svensmark of the National Space Institute in Copenhagen, posits a link between solar activity and cosmic-ray flux.

Sun

Jupiter's Moon Io has a Sea of Magma Beneath its Surface

With its famous volcanoes, Io produced about 30 times more heat than Earth per year, putting our planet to shame in the volcano game. While scientists had guessed that a vast ocean of magma lies beneath the surface of the fiery moon, they couldn't prove it - until now.

Image
© Xianzhe Jia -UMICH & Krishan Khurana -UCLAUnderneath a low-density crust of 30-50 km thickness exists a global magma layer (asthenosphere) with a thickness exceeding 50 km and a rock melt fraction of a few tens of percent.
Jupiter's moon Io is the only place in the solar system besides Earth with volcanoes that spew molten rock. In fact, it's the most volcanically active body in the solar system, producing 30 times more heat than Earth despite being 70 times less massive. But the source of all this volcanism was hidden from scientists, until now - a new study reveals the vast ocean of semimolten magma that lies beneath the moon's volcano-ridden surface.

Io's center is in constant flux: Jupiter's enormous gravity pulls on the moon's "slushie-like interior," UCLA geophysicist Krishan Khurana says, and all that friction produces an enormous amount of thermal energy, through what's called tidal heating. The heat melts rock to create magma, which spews out of the 400 or so volcanoes on Io's crust. Previously, however, scientists weren't sure exactly how that magma was distributed. Some thought it might have come from isolated underground pockets or wellsprings, as is the case on Earth, rather than a global layer of magma.

Telescope

Haumea: Mysterious radioactive rugby-ball world

Image
© UnknownRed-spotted radioactive rugby-ball: remarkable.
Boffins probe secrets of bizarro Kuiper belt denizen

The fifth "dwarf planet" of the solar system, Haumea, is shaped like a rugby ball 2,000km long and its icy surface is warmed by radioactive uranium and thorium ores in its interior.

The strange ellipsoid world is thought to have a day just four hours long, and is attended by a brace of moons as it circles the Sun far out in the distant Kuiper belt beyond the planet Neptune.

These new revelations on Haumea, which was only discovered in 2005, come to us courtesy of a team of international astronomers who have been probing the strange object using the aptly-big Very Large Telescope operated by the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

According to the latest observations, the surface of Haumea and its moon Hi'aka are covered with crystalline water ice. Normally, considering the outrageously chilly temperatures which prevail out beyond Neptune, the ice would have become glass, without a crystalline structure: there must be some form of heating present.

Sherlock

Caves and their dripstones tell us about the uplift of mountains

Caves Quakes Mountains
© Michael MeyerIn a recent Geology paper, geologists from the universities of Innsbruck and Leeds report on ancient cave systems discovered near the summits of the Allgäu Mountains that preserved the oldest radiometrically dated dripstones currently known from the European Alps.
In one of his songs Bob Dylan asks "How many years can a mountain exist before it is washed to the sea?", and thus poses an intriguing geological question for which an accurate answer is not easily provided. Mountain ranges are in a constant interplay between climatically controlled weathering processes on the one hand and the tectonic forces that cause folding and thrusting and thus thickening of the Earth's crust on the other hand. While erosion eventually erases any geological obstacles, tectonic forces are responsible for piling- and lifting-up rocks and thus for forming spectacular mountain landscapes such as the European Alps. In reality, climate, weathering and mountain uplift interact in a complex manner and quantifying rates for erosion and uplift, especially for the last couple of millions of years, remains a challenging task.

In a recent Geology paper Michael Meyer (University of Innsbruck) et al. report on ancient cave systems discovered near the summits of the Allgäu Mountains (Austria) that preserved the oldest radiometrically dated dripstones currently known from the European Alps. "These cave deposits formed ca. 2 million years ago and their geochemical signature and biological inclusions are vastly different from other cave calcites in the Alps" says Meyer, who works at the Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

Telescope

Thirty Supernovas per Second in the Observable Universe! Is the Red Giant Betelgeuse Next?

Supernova
© The Daily Galaxy
Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars in the sky, could burst into its supernova phase and become as bright as a full moon -- and last for as long as a year. The massive star is visible in the winter sky over most of the world as a bright, reddish star, could explode as a supernova anytime within the next 100,000 years.

Most astronomers today believe that one of the plausible reasons we have yet to detect intelligent life in the universe is due to the deadly effects of local supernova explosions that wipe out all life in a given region of a galaxy.

While there is, on average, only one supernova per galaxy per century, there is something on the order of 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. Taking 10 billion years for the age of the Universe (it's actually 13.7 billion, but stars didn't form for the first few hundred million), Dr. Richard Mushotzky of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, derived a figure of 1 billion supernovae per year, or 30 supernovae per second in the observable Universe!

The red giant Betelgeuse, once so large it would reach out to Jupiter's orbit if placed in our own solar system, has shrunk by 15 percent over the past decade in a half, although it's just as bright as it's ever been.