Science & TechnologyS


Info

Earth's Past, Made Visible


Astrobiology Magazine
Mon, 23 May 2011 13:26 UTC
Past Earths
© Planetary Habitability LaboratoryThe many faces of Earth in the last 750 million years.
The Visible Paleo-Earth (VPE), the first collection of photorealistic visualizations of our planet from space in the last 750 million years, was created by The Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL) of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo (UPR Arecibo). The VPE visualizations show in real true colors the changes of land and vegetation experimented by Earth in thirty frames starting from 750 million years ago to today. This was the period where simple life forms were restricted to the oceans, and later became complex and larger populating the land areas.

The VPE visualizations were constructed by combining the color images of Earth from NASA's Next Generation Blue Marble with the well-known global paleo reconstructions of Ronald Blakey from Northern Arizona University and Christopher Scotese from University of Texas at Arlington.

"Special care was taken in representing the presumed colors and brightness of the surface features of ancient Earth, but this is task with many artistic liberties due to our limited knowledge of those periods," says Prof. Abel Méndez, Director of the PHL and Principal Investigator of the project.
Read More...
Saturn

Enceladus' electrical connection to Saturn


NASA/JPL/University of Colorado/Central Arizona College
Wed, 20 Apr 2011 01:20 UTC
saturn
© jpl.nasa.govEnceladus 'Footprint' on Saturn

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has spotted a glowing patch of ultraviolet light near Saturn's north pole that marks the presence of an electrical circuit that connects Saturn with its moon Enceladus. This newly discovered patch occurs at the "footprint" of the magnetic connection between Saturn and Enceladus and indicates electrons and ions accelerating along magnetic field lines. White boxes indicate the location of this footprint, which scientists have long predicted but never before seen.

Comment: See also:

Zap: Saturn, odd moon have electric link

The true origins of the electric comet theory

Electric Comet Theory: The Enduring - Yet Downplayed - Mysteries of Comets

Read More...
Magnify

Superhuman Hearing Possible, Experiments Suggest

Ker Than
National Geographic News
Mon, 16 May 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© Wes C. Skiles/National GeographicDivers can hear better than people on land
Vibrating ear bones could someday boost hearing.

People may one day be able to hear what are now inaudible sounds, scientists say.

New experiments suggest that just vibrating the ear bones could create shortcuts for sounds to enter the brain, thus boosting hearing.

Most people can hear sounds in the range of about 20 hertz (Hz) at the low end to about 20 kilohertz (kHz) at the high end.

Twenty kHz would sound like a very high-pitched mosquito buzz, and 20 Hz would be what you'd hear if "you were at an R&B concert and you just stood next to the bass," explained Michael Qin, a senior research scientist at the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory in Connecticut.
Read More...
Telescope

Dark Energy Is Driving Universe Apart: NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer Finds Dark Energy Repulsive


Science Daily
Thu, 19 May 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© NASA/JPL-CaltechNew results from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Anglo-Australian Telescope atop Siding Spring Mountain in Australia confirm that dark energy (represented by purple grid) is a smooth, uniform force that now dominates over the effects of gravity (green grid). The observations follow from careful measurements of the separations between pairs of galaxies (examples of such pairs are illustrated here).
A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

The survey used data from NASA's space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Anglo-Australian Telescope on Siding Spring Mountain in Australia.

The findings offer new support for the favored theory of how dark energy works -- as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion. They contradict an alternate theory, where gravity, not dark energy, is the force pushing space apart. According to this alternate theory, with which the new survey results are not consistent, Albert Einstein's concept of gravity is wrong, and gravity becomes repulsive instead of attractive when acting at great distances.

"The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster," said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Blake is lead author of two papers describing the results that appeared in recent issues of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "The results tell us that dark energy is a cosmological constant, as Einstein proposed. If gravity were the culprit, then we wouldn't be seeing these constant effects of dark energy throughout time."
Read More...
Beaker

New technique sheds light on the mysterious process of cell division


Penn State University
Sat, 21 May 2011 17:05 UTC
Image
© UnknownAfter the primitive model cell divides, one daughter cell inherits only one kind of lipid membrane (red) and most of the protein molecules (blue), while the other inherits two kinds of lipids (red and green)

University Park, Pennsylvania - Using a new technique in which models of primitive cells are constructed from the bottom up, scientists have demonstrated that the structure of a cell's membrane and cytoplasm may be as important to cell division as the specialized machinery -- such as enzymes, DNA or RNA -- that are found within living cells.

Christine Keating, an associate professor of chemistry at Penn State, and Meghan Andes-Koback, a graduate student in the Penn State Department of Chemistry, generated simple, nonliving model "cells" with which they established that asymmetric division -- the process by which a cell splits to become two distinct daughter cells -- is possible even in the absence of complex cellular components, such as genes. The study, which will be published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, may provide important clues to how life originated from nonlife and how modern cells came to exhibit complex behaviors.
Read More...
Magnify

Not So Dumb After All: Tyrannosaurus Rex Hunted in Bloodthirsty Packs, Researchers Claim


The Daily Mail, UK
Thu, 19 May 2011 06:47 UTC
T-Rex Research
© Press AssociationLead researcher Dr Philip Currie with a Tyrannosaurid fossil. Scientists now believe the top predator was a highly-intelligent pack animal, despite being popularly depicted as a dangerous but dim-witted loner
Tyrannosaurus rex and its relatives were more intelligent than previously thought and hunted in gangs which included young and older members, researchers have claimed.

Scientists believe they have evidence that the top predator dinosaurs were highly intelligent pack animals, despite T-rex being popularly depicted as a dangerous but dim-witted loner.

This is a myth that has grown up because for many years their fossil skeletons tended to be found on their own, researchers say.

The new theory follows an analysis of skeletons of the tyrannosaur Tarbosaurus bataar from 90 sites in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia.

Tarbosaurus, a cousin of T-rex that lived around 70 million years ago, was a two-legged predator up to 12 metres long and weighing five tonnes.

At least half a dozen of the animals appear to have belonged to a single social group, including adults and juveniles, that died together.
Read More...
Stop

The Unintended Consequences of Artificial Life


The Daily Galaxy
Sat, 21 May 2011 13:24 UTC
Gene Manipulation
© The Daily Galaxy
This is "the first self-replicating species we've had on the planet whose parent is a computer."

Dr. Craig Venter - pioneer of the human genome
2010 might be looked back on as the year of the Earth's first non-biological self-replicating species. The genome pioneer J. Craig Venter has taken another step in his quest to create synthetic life by synthesizing an entire bacterial genome and using it to take over a cell.

In his famous essay, Why the Future Doesn't Need Us, Silicon Valley scientist and software engineer, Bill Joy warns about possible dangers of genetic engineering using a work of fiction as a possible scenario. In The White Plague, by Frank Herbert - a molecular biologist is driven insane by the senseless murder of his family. To seek revenge he constructs and disseminates a new and highly contagious plague that kills widely but selectively.

Joy asks why weren't people more concerned about possible nightmarish scenarios of future genetic creations? Part of the answer, he says, "lies in our bias toward instant familiarity and unquestioning acceptance. Accustomed to living with almost routine scientific breakthroughs, we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology - pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once - but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control."
Read More...
Saturn

Skydiving on Saturn

Pete Wilton
PhysOrg.com
Fri, 20 May 2011 11:00 UTC
skydiving Saturn
© OU/ESO/Fletcher/BarryIllustration of Saturn skydiving.
Daredevils regularly bail out at high altitude to skydive through Earth's atmosphere but what would it be like to skydive on Saturn?

Would you jump in summer into an atmosphere shrouded in a yellow-ochre haze, aim for winter when the planet is tinged blue, or maybe leap into the shadow of those famous rings?

These thoughts were prompted by new research from an international team led by Oxford University scientists into a powerful storm on Saturn first spotted in December 2010.

"What we see when we look at Saturn in visible light is the top of the cloud decks - that's near the top of the troposphere or 'weather zone' - made up of ammonia clouds and other hazy materials," Leigh Fletcher of Oxford University's Department of Physics, who led the work, tells us.
Read More...
Eye 2

Mammals' large brains evolved for smell

Victoria Gill
BBC
Fri, 20 May 2011 17:04 UTC
Image
© M A Klinger / Carnegie Museum of Natural HistoryThe researchers scanned the fossilised skulls of tiny, very early mammals
A highly developed sense of smell kick-started the development of mammals' big brains.

Scientists used very high-resolution scanning to study the skulls of two of the earliest known mammal species.

Comparing the shape of their brain cases to those of slightly earlier animals, or "pre-mammals", revealed that the first brain areas to over-develop were those associated with the sense of smell.

The findings are published in Science.

An improved sense of smell may have allowed our tiny, furry ancestors to hunt at night.

The researchers were able to create 3D images of prehistoric animals' brains using the latest computed tomography, or CT, scanning methods.

"Before CT, one had to break open a fossil to get to the internal anatomy," explained Professor Timothy Rowe from the University of Texas at Austin, one of the researchers involved in the study.

"[This technique] is non-destructive, so we can measure internal anatomy in ways that were never before possible."
Read More...
Beaker

US: 135-Year-Old Piece of Skin Triggers Smallpox Scare at Museum


Foxnews.com/ The Wall Street Journal
Thu, 19 May 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© APA child affected by the smallpox virus.
An outbreak of smallpox was the furthest thing from historian Dr. Paul Levengood's mind when his staff at the Virginia Historical Society put together an exhibit of "bizarre bits" that were added to the society's collection since its founding in 1831, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

There was Confederate president Jefferson Davis's cigar, confiscated by Union troops. There was a fungus carving of Robert E. Lee on his horse, Traveller, and a wreath made of human hair.

Then someone mentioned a letter, handwritten and dated 1876, with what appeared to be a smallpox scab pinned inside -- light brown, about the size of a pencil eraser and crumbling.

The scab got the attention of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), home to one of the world's two known caches of live smallpox viruses.

Alerted by a government scientist in Maryland who was concerned that the scab might transmit infection, the agency dispatched two CDC representatives to Richmond. They donned disposable surgical gowns and gloves, lifted the scab from a display case, sealed it in bio-bags inside a red cooler and whisked it back to a high-security lab deep within the CDC's Atlanta headquarters.
Read More...