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Researchers Resurrect 'Multiverse' Theory


redOrbit
Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:45 UTC
Multiverse
© redOrbit

Researchers have resurrected the theory that other universes lie within "bubbles" of space and time, known as the "Multiverse" theory.

Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that these "bubble universes" have left marks on our own.

The theory is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to perform.

A team of scientists used data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) to help reignite this theory.

This probe measures detail of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which s the faint glow left from the formation of the Universe.

The multiverse theory said these bubble universes are popping into and out of existence and colliding all the time, with the space between them rapidly expanding.

Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist at University College London, and her colleagues say that when these universes are created adjacent to our own, they may leave a characteristic pattern in the CMB.

"I'd heard about this 'multiverse' for years and years, and I never took it seriously because I thought it's not testable," Dr Peiris told BBC News. "I was just amazed by the idea that you can test for all these other universes out there - it's just mind-blowing."
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Earth Had Two Moons That Crashed to Form One, Study Suggests

Charles Q. Choi
Space.com
Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:01 UTC
Moon Collision
© Martin Jutzi and Erik AsphaugThis computer illustration depicts a collision between Earth’s moon and a companion moon that is 750 miles wide and about 4 percent of the lunar mass. This late, slow accretion could explain the moon's farside highlands, scientists say.
A tiny second moon may once have orbited Earth before catastrophically slamming into the other one, a titanic clash that could explain why the two sides of the surviving lunar satellite are so different from each other, a new study suggests.

The second moon around Earth would have been about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) wide and could have formed from the same collision between the planet and a Mars-sized object that scientists suspect helped create the moon we see in the sky today, astronomers said.

The gravitational tug of war between the Earth and moon slowed the rate at which it whirls, such that it now always shows just one side to Earth. The far side of the moon remained a mystery for centuries until 1959, when the Soviet Luna 3 spacecraft first snapped photos of it. (The far side is sometimes erroneously called the dark side, even though it has days and nights just like the near side.)
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Question

"Does an Unknown Level of Technology Beyond Matter Exist?"

Casey Kazan
The Daily Galaxy
Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:55 UTC
Alien Life Forms
© Jerry Taylor / Flickr
Last year, Stephen Hawking warned that contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization could have dire consequences for the human species. Arthur C Clarke once made the famous observation that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.

Following in their footsteps, world-renowned experts from physicist Sir Martin Rees of Cambridge University to astrobiologist Paul Davis of Arizona State have asked if we were to encounter alien technology far superior to our own, would we even realize what it was. A technology a million or more years in advance of ours could appear miraculous or be undetectable.

In fact, Davies writes in his new book, Eerie Silence, that advanced technology might not even be made of matter. That it might have no fixed size or shape; have no well-defined boundaries. Is dynamical on all scales of space and time. Or, conversely, does not appear to do anything at all that we can discern. Does not consist of discrete, separate things; but rather it is a system,or a subtle higher-level correlation of things.
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Einstein

Why Aren't We Smarter?

Natalie Wolchover
Life's Little Mysteries
Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:25 UTC
Einstein
© Life's Little Mysteries

Albert Einstein was mind-bogglingly smart. His brain, no bigger than an average man's, somehow worked better, making unprecedented mental leaps between space and time and ultimately linking them together to form spacetime, a strange and (to most people) almost inconceivable entity. Einstein's brain saw the universe and got it.

Why can't we all be that smart?

"You have two separate lines of research converging for the first time to suggest an answer," said Edward Bullmore, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University in England. "Brains have evolved not just to minimize cost, and not just to become as intelligent as possible, but to reach a balance between those things."

Bullmore is currently using brain-imaging techniques to look at how much energy the functioning brain uses. Brains are extremely expensive, energy-wise, he noted: Though they take up only 2 percent of our body mass, they burn 20 percent of our energy.
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Savanna, not forest, was human ancestors' proving ground

Charles Q. Choi
Live Science
Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:01 UTC
Savanna
© Thure Cerling, University of UtahAn East African savanna landscape of tree-dotted grassland is shown in this image from Samburu National Reserve in Kenya. The more heavily vegetated area in the middle distance is the corridor of the Ewaso Ngiro River. A new University of Utah study concludes that savanna was the predominant ecosystem during the evolution of human ancestors and their chimp and gorilla relatives in East Africa.
The savannas of Africa may have become the cradle of human evolution millions of years earlier than thought, researchers suggest. These rolling grasslands would have nurtured our ancestors through pivotal moments in their evolution.

These findings provide new ammunition in debates over the forces that helped distinguish humans from other animals.

The human lineage originated about 2.5 million years ago, coinciding with the expansion of savannas - grasslands mixed with trees - across East Africa. As such, researchers have long speculated that savannas were key to our evolution. For instance, the replacement of woodlands with savannas may have prompted the ancestors of humans to stray from trees and begin walking upright across the grass, which in turn would have freed up their hands for tool use.

Recently, however, the importance of savannas in human evolution came under question. For instance, what may be the earliest human ancestor discovered yet, Ardipithecus ramidus, was thought to have lived 4.4 million years ago in woodlands.
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Beaker

Swede cuffed for cooking nuclear reactor on kitchen stovetop

Rik Myslewski
The Register
Tue, 02 Aug 2011 06:16 UTC
Add radioactive smoke detector innards. Stir

A Swedish man was arrested and briefly detained for attempting to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen.

"I've always been interested in nuclear physics and particle physics," the unnamed 31-year-old told the Helsingborgs Dagblad (Google Translate). "I have read many books about it and wanted to see if it worked. I just thought of it as an experiment."
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Do Bees Have Feelings?

Jason Castro
Scientific American
Tue, 02 Aug 2011 18:03 UTC
Honey Bee
© AntagainMight this bee be blue?

If you've never watched bees carefully, you're missing out. Looking up close as they gently curl and uncoil their tapered mouths toward food, you sense that they're not just eating, but enjoying. Watch a bit more, and the hesitant flicks and sags of their antennae seem to convey some kind of emotion. Maybe annoyance? Or something like agitation?

Whether bees really experience any of these things is an open scientific question. It's also an important one with implications for how we should treat not just bees, but the great majority of animals. Recently, studies by Geraldine Wright and her colleagues at Newcastle University in the UK have rekindled debate over these issues by showing that honeybees may experience something akin to moods.

Using simple behavioral tests, Wright's research team showed that like other lab-tested brooders -- which so far include us, monkeys, dogs, and starlings -- stressed bees tend to see the glass as half empty. While this doesn't (and can't) prove that bees experience human-like emotions, it does give pause. We should take seriously the possibility that it feels like something to be an insect.

As invertebrates -- animals without backbones -- bees are representatives of a diverse group accounting for over 95 percent of animal species. But despite their prevalence, not to mention their varied and often nuanced behaviors, invertebrates are sometimes regarded as life's second string, as a mindless and unfeeling band of alien critters. If that seems a bit melodramatic, just consider our willingness to boil some of them alive.
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Meteor

NASA Dawn Spacecraft Reveals New Insights into Mysterious Vesta Asteroid 184 Million Km Away From Earth

Alastair Stevenson
International Business Times
Tue, 02 Aug 2011 04:42 UTC
Vesta Asteroid
© NASANASA's Dawn spacecraft is beginning the first of it four intensive research orbits, with its initial run around the Vesta asteroid scheduled to begin on 11 August.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft is beginning the first of it four intensive research orbits, with its initial run around the Vesta asteroid scheduled to begin on 11 August.

The spacecraft will soon begin circling the giant asteroid at an altitude of roughly 1,700 miles, providing key data and in-depth analysis of the Vesta giant.

Vesta is the brightest object viewable from Earth in the asteroid cluster surrounding Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury. Previously, little was known about the giant though it is believed to be roughly 530 kilometres large in diameter. The Dawn has already taken an image of Vesta showing its its rocky outer surface for the first time in human history.

The images have all been taken while the Dawn is still roughly 5,200 km from the asteroid. NASA has since confirmed that the current images are primarily for navigation rather than overtly scientific purposes.
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Bulb

Unexpected Clue to Thermopower Efficiency: Uneven Temperature Can Lead to Electronic Whirlpools and Sideways Magnetic Fields


Science Daily
Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© Jinqiao Wu, Lawrence Berkeley National LaboratoryAn n-type semiconductor on top of a p-type semiconductor creates a vertical electric field (E, green arrow), while diffusion creates a depletion layer near the junction (orange), where the electric field is strongest. Heating one end of the device creates a heat gradient at right angles to the electric field (del T, red arrow). Electrons and holes moving in these fields are forced into loops of current, and a magnetic field is generated “sideways” (B, blue arrow), at right angles to both electric and thermal fields.
Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues have discovered a new relation among electric and magnetic fields and differences in temperature, which may lead to more efficient thermoelectric devices that convert heat into electricity or electricity into heat.
"In the search for new sources of energy, thermopower -- the ability to convert temperature differences directly into electricity without wasteful intervening steps -- is tremendously promising," says Junqiao Wu of Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division (MSD), who led the research team. Wu is also a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. "But the new effect we've discovered has been overlooked by the thermopower community, and can greatly affect the efficiency of thermopower and other devices."
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Info

Oxygen Molecules Discovered in Deep Space for First Time


Space.com
Mon, 01 Aug 2011 11:29 UTC
Oxygen Molecule
© ESA/NASA/JPL-CaltechThe Herschel space telescope found the molecules in a dense patch of gas and dust adjacent to star-forming regions in the Orion nebula.
Astronomers can finally breathe a sigh of relief: A team of scientists has discovered the first oxygen molecules in deep space, capping a nearly 230-year search for the elusive cosmic molecule.

The oxygen molecules were detected in a star-forming region of the Orion nebula, roughly 1,500 light-years from Earth, by the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory. The observatory used its large telescope and infrared detectors to hone in on the species, which is thought to be common in the cosmos, but has so far been hard to find.

Individual atoms of oxygen (called atomic oxygen) are common in space, particularly around massive stars. But molecular oxygen, which is formed of two bonded oxygen atoms and makes up about 20 percent of the air we breathe on Earth, has eluded astronomers until now.

"Oxygen gas was discovered in the 1770s, but it's taken us more than 230 years to finally say with certainty that this very simple molecule exists in space," Paul Goldsmith, NASA's Herschel project scientist at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. Goldsmith is lead author of a recent paper describing the findings in the Astrophysical Journal.
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