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Beringians Found In Icelandic Gene Pool


The Right Perspective
Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:55 UTC
Beringians_1
© The Right PerspectiveIcelanders in the southern part of the country have been found to have Beringian DNA.

New anthropology and genealogy studies indicate that "Native" Americans, more correctly known as Beringians for having entered the North American continent from Asia via the Bering Straits, accompanied Norsemen to Iceland 500 years before Christopher Columbus discovered America.

The controversial theory is put forward in the Master thesis of Sigrídur Sunna Ebeneserdóttir, who is studying anthropology at the University of Iceland (HÍ), and was conducted on behalf of deCODE Genetics. According to the study published in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, some 350 Icelanders alive today carry genes characteristic of Beringians, and proves Europeans had been in North America more than 1,000 years ago.

Ebenesdóttir's work is the continuation of a study published in 2000 by HÍ and deCODE anthropologist Agnar Helgason, who served as her tutor. In his study, Helgason indicated that most of the women who settled in Iceland came from the British Isles, while most of the male settlers came from Scandinavia.
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Question

Should Pluto Be a Planet After All? Experts Weigh In

Mike Wall
Spcae.com
Fri, 19 Nov 2010 07:19 UTC
Pluto
© Space.comPluto

Now that Pluto may have regained its status as the largest object in the outer solar system, should astronomers consider giving it back another former title - that of full-fledged planet?

Pluto was demoted to a newly created category, "dwarf planet," in 2006, partly because of the discovery a year earlier of Eris, another icy body from Pluto's neighborhood. Eris was thought to be bigger than Pluto until Nov. 6, when astronomers got a chance to recalculate Eris' size.

Now it appears that Pluto reigns - though only by the slimmest of margins (the numbers are so close as to be nearly indistinguishable, when uncertainties are taken into account).

The new finding brings renewed attention to Pluto, and to the controversial decision to strip the frigid world of its planet status. Should Pluto be a planet? Should Eris, and many other objects circling the sun beyond Neptune's orbit? Or is the current system, which recognizes just eight relatively large planets, the way to go?

SPACE.com asked some experts to weigh in on this debate, which affects how astronomers view the solar system, as well as how complicated school children's planet-memorizing mnemonics must be.
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Evil Rays

Study finds Wi-Fi makes trees sick

René Schoemake
MacWorld
Fri, 19 Nov 2010 10:28 UTC
tree
© na

All deciduous trees in the Western world are affected

Radiation from Wi-Fi networks is harmful to trees, causing significant variations in growth, as well as bleeding and fissures in the bark, according to a recent study in the Netherlands.

All deciduous trees in the Western world are affected, according to the study by a group of institutions, including the TU Delft University and Wageningen University. The city of Alphen aan den Rijn ordered the study five years ago after officials found unexplained abnormalities on trees that couldn't be ascribed to a virus or bacterial infection.

Additional testing found the disease to occur throughout the Western world. In the Netherlands, about 70 percent of all trees in urban areas show the same symptoms, compared with only 10 percent five years ago. Trees in densely forested areas are hardly affected.
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Telescope

Spacecraft Flew Through 'Snowstorm' on Encounter with Comet Hartley 2

Lee Tune
University of Maryland
Fri, 19 Nov 2010 06:51 UTC
Image
© Unknown
College Park. -- On its recent trip by comet Hartley 2, the Deep Impact spacecraft took the first pictures of, and flew through, a storm of fluffy particles of water ice being spewed out by carbon dioxide jets coming from the rough ends of the comet. The resulting images and data shed new light on the nature and composition of comets, according to the University of Maryland-led EPOXI science team, which today announced its latest findings and released the first images of this comet created snowstorm.
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Magnify

First Americans "Reached Europe Five Centuries Before Columbus Discoveries'

Giles Tremlett
The Guardian, UK
Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:43 UTC
Image
© PoodlesRock/CorbisChristopher Columbus did not introduce the first native Americans to Europe, according to new research
Scientists claim first Americans arrived long before Columbus bumped into an island in the Bahamas in 1492.

When Christopher Columbus paraded his newly discovered American Indians through the streets of Spanish towns at the end of the 15th century, he was not in fact introducing the first native Americans to Europe, according to new research.

Scientists who have studied the genetic past of an Icelandic family now claim the first Americans reached Europe a full five centuries before Columbus bumped into an island in the Bahamas during his first voyage of discovery in 1492.

Researchers said today that a woman from the Americas probably arrived in Iceland 1,000 years ago, leaving behind genes that are reflected in about 80 Icelanders today.

The link was first detected among inhabitants of Iceland, home to one of the most thorough gene-mapping programs in the world, several years ago.
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Telescope

First Glimpse of a Planet from Another Galaxy

Jean-Louis Santini
Agence France-Presse
Thu, 18 Nov 2010 12:00 UTC
Image
© Agence France-PresseThis artist's impression shows HIP 13044 b, an exoplanet orbiting a star
A hot, gaseous and fast-spinning planet has been found orbiting a dying star on the edge of the Milky Way, in the first such discovery of a planet from outside our galaxy, scientists said Thursday.

Slightly larger than the size of Jupiter, the largest in our solar system, the newly discovered exoplanet is orbiting a star 2,000 light years from Earth that has found its way into the Milky Way.

The pair are believed to be part of the Helmi stream, a group of stars that remains after its mini-galaxy was devoured by the Milky Way some six to nine billion years ago, said the study in Science Express.

"This discovery is very exciting," said Rainer Klement of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.

"Because of the great distances involved, there are no confirmed detections of planets in other galaxies. But this cosmic merger has brought an extragalactic planet within our reach."
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Telescope

NASA'S Chandra Finds Youngest Nearby Black Hole


NASA
Mon, 15 Nov 2010 02:06 UTC
black hole
© Unknown
Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence of the youngest black hole known to exist in our cosmic neighborhood. The 30-year-old black hole provides a unique opportunity to watch this type of object develop from infancy.

The black hole could help scientists better understand how massive stars explode, which ones leave behind black holes or neutron stars, and the number of black holes in our galaxy and others.

The 30-year-old object is a remnant of SN 1979C, a supernova in the galaxy M100 approximately 50 million light years from Earth. Data from Chandra, NASA's Swift satellite, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and the German ROSAT observatory revealed a bright source of X-rays that has remained steady during observation from 1995 to 2007. This suggests the object is a black hole being fed either by material falling into it from the supernova or a binary companion.
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Meteor

Comet Snowstorm Engulfs Hartley 2

Dr. Tony Phillips
Science@NASA
Thu, 18 Nov 2010 15:30 UTC
Image
© Deep Impact, NASAThis contrast-enhanced image obtained during Deep Impact's Nov. 4th flyby of Comet Hartley 2 reveals a cloud of icy particles surrounding the comet's active nucleus.
NASA has just issued a travel advisory for spacecraft: Watch out for Comet Hartley 2, it is experiencing a significant winter snowstorm.

Deep Impact photographed the unexpected tempest when it flew past the comet's nucleus on Nov. 4th at a distance of only 700 km (435 miles). At first, researchers only noticed the comet's hyperactive jets. The icy nucleus is studded with them, flamboyantly spewing carbon dioxide from dozens of sites. A closer look revealed an even greater marvel, however. The space around the comet's core is glistening with chunks of ice and snow, some of them possibly as large as a basketball.

"We've never seen anything like this before," says University of Maryland professor Mike A'Hearn, principal investigator of Deep Impact's EPOXI mission. "It really took us by surprise."

Before the flyby of Hartley 2, international spacecraft visited four other comet cores - Halley, Borrelly, Wild 2, and Tempel 1. None was surrounded by "comet snow." Tempel 1 is particularly telling because Deep Impact itself performed the flyby. The very same high resolution, high dynamic range cameras that recorded snow-chunks swirling around Hartley 2 did not detect anything similar around Tempel 1.

"This is a genuinely new phenomenon," says science team member Jessica Sunshine of the University of Maryland. "Comet Hartley 2 is not like the other comets we've visited."
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Blackbox

Scientists claim breakthrough in antimatter hunt

Frank Jordans
Associated Press
Thu, 18 Nov 2010 13:55 UTC
Image
© AP Photo/CERNPhoto released by CERN on Thursday, Nov 18, 2010 shows an image taken by the ALPHA annihilation detector showing untrapped antihydrogen atoms annihilating on the inner surface of the ALPHA trap.
Scientists claimed a breakthrough Thursday toward solving one of the biggest riddles of physics, trapping an "anti-atom" for the first time in a quest to understand what happened to all the antimatter that has vanished since the Big Bang.

An international team of physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, managed to keep atoms of anti-hydrogen from disappearing long enough to demonstrate that they can be studied in the lab.

"For us it's a big breakthrough because it means we can take the next step, which is to try to compare matter and antimatter," the team's spokesman, American scientist Jeffrey Hangst, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

"This field is 20 years old and has been making incremental progress toward exactly this all along the way," he added. "We really think that this was the most difficult step."

Researchers have puzzled for decades over why antimatter seems to have disappeared from the universe.

Theory posits that matter and its opposite, antimatter - both are defined as having mass and taking up space - were created in equal amounts at the moment of the Big Bang, which spawned the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. While matter went on to become the building block of everything that exists, antimatter has all but disappeared except in the lab.
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Info

Another Doomed Comet


Space Weather
Thu, 18 Nov 2010 11:21 UTC
For the second time in less than a week, a comet is diving toward the sun. Polish comet hunter Michal Kusiak found it yesterday in coronagraph images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory:

Doomed Comet
© Spaceweather
Click here for an UPDATED movie

It's no coincidence that this comet is following the same path as its predecessor on Nov. 14th. They are both fragments of a single giant comet that broke apart about 2000 years ago. Astronomers call them "Kruetz sungrazers" after the 19th century German researcher, Heinrich Kreutz, who studied them in detail.

"November is one of the best months to discover Kreutz comets," notes Kusiak. "It's because the field of view of the SOHO coronagraph covers a larger-than-usual portion of the Kreutz track. December, May, and June are good, too."

With SOHO staring at just the right patch of sky, more sungrazers are probably in the offing. First, however, this one has a date with destiny, and it probably won't survive. Solar heating is expected to obliterate the icy sundiver later today or tomorrow. Stay tuned for movies of the death plunge.
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