Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

SpaceX to Develop Reusable Launch System for Cheap Spaceflight, Mars Settlement

Tiffany Kaiser
Daily Tech
Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:22 UTC
Image
© universetoday.com
California-based space transport company SpaceX is looking to build a fully reusable orbital launch system that could make spaceflight more affordable, and eventually send people to Mars for permanent settlement.

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has mapped out a way for the Falcon 9 rocket to deliver a Dragon spacecraft to orbit, then return to the launch site by touching down vertically under rocket power on landing gear. At the same time, the Dragon would make a supplies delivery to the International Space Station and return from orbit to make its own landing.

Achieving a reusable space transport has been difficult because of the engineering challenges associated with such a feat, but many have tried because a totally reusable rocket would cut the cost of spaceflight. Traditional rockets can only be used once, and a Falcon 9, for example, can cost about $50 million to $60 million.

Over the past year, Musk and his team at SpaceX managed to solve the complexities that have stumped many before and even made an animation of how the plan could work, which is a 90 percent accurate depiction. They now hope to make the reusable rocket system a reality.
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Radar

No crystal ball necessary: Scientists can accurately predict leadership emergence


VU University Amsterdam
Mon, 03 Oct 2011 06:43 UTC
Image
© UnknownJohn McCain
Dutch scientists at VU University Amsterdam are able to quite accurately predict the emergence of leaders in domains such as politics and the military. They developed a model of leadership emergence based on the interaction between our biological properties and social environment.

The model suggests that being selected as a leader is for a large part dependent on a match between physical attributes (such as the face), the message the leader conveys, and the perceived situation requirements in which the leader has to make decisions. For instance, this model has shown that in times where the perception of threat is great, potential leaders with a masculine face emphasizing this threat in their message are most likely to be elected as leader. On the other hand, potential leaders with a feminine face may be better off profiling themselves as a peacemaker, and attempt to make the majority of followers perceive the need for cooperation in the social network - rather than conflict - as the most important and beneficial need.
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Bizarro Earth

Earth's First Arctic Ozone Hole Recorded

Wynne Parry
Live Science
Sun, 02 Oct 2011 12:01 UTC
Stratospheric clouds
© Ross J. Salawitch, University of MarylandStratospheric clouds above the Arctic.

The high atmosphere over the Arctic lost an unprecedented amount of its protective ozone earlier this year, so much that conditions echoed the infamous ozone hole that forms annually over the opposite side of the planet, the Antarctic, scientists say.

"For the first time, sufficient loss occurred to reasonably be described as an Arctic ozone hole," write researchers in an article released Oct. 2 by the journal Nature.

Some degree of ozone loss above the Arctic, and the formation of the Antarctic ozone hole, are annual events during the poles' respective winters. They are driven by a combination of cold temperatures and lingering ozone-depleting pollutants.

The reactions that convert less reactive chemicals into ozone-destroying ones take place within what is known as the polar vortex, an atmospheric circulation pattern created by the rotation of the Earth and cold temperatures. This past winter and spring saw an unusually strong polar vortex and an unusually long cold period.

This year's record vortex persisted over the Arctic from December to the end of March, and the cold temperatures extended down to a remarkably low altitude, the researchers write.
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Info

Life's Extremes: Early Birds Versus Night Owls

Adam Hadhazy
Live Science
Sun, 02 Oct 2011 07:23 UTC
Life Style
© Karl Tate, LiveScience Infographic ArtistDo you like your morning coffee at 6 a.m. or more like Noon?

It's 6:30 a.m. For "early birds" or "larks," that's prime time. For "night owls," however, such an hour is ungodly.

Most of us are neither pure lark nor owl. But we all know people who can spring out of bed at the crack of dawn or stay alert well into the wee hours. In recent years, science has increasingly shown why these extremes exist.

Right from birth, our personal biological clocks are already wound. Genetics establishes a person's "chronotype," which is pegged to when his or her body feels up and at 'em.

"People span the range of those who are very early risers to very late setters, and this is genetically determined," said Frederick Brown, a professor of psychology at Penn State.

To a certain extent, behavior and environment - say, routinely pumping iron in a well-lit gym toward midnight - can shift our built-in predispositions. But for those of us squarely in one chronotype camp or the other, in the end, the body is the boss.

"If you're a morning-type person, you can't become an evening type, and vice versa," said Brown.
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Question

Are Aliens Part of God's Plan, Too? Finding E.T. Could Change Religion Forever

Clara Moskowitz
Space.com
Sun, 02 Oct 2011 07:51 UTC
Aliens
© DreamstimeAliens with UFO.


Orlando, Florida - The discovery of intelligent aliens would be mind-blowing in many respects, but it could present a special dilemma for the world's religions, theologians pondering interstellar travel concepts said Saturday (Oct. 1).

Christians, in particular, might take the news hardest, because the Christian belief system does not easily allow for other intelligent beings in the universe, Christian thinkers said at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to discuss issues surrounding traveling to other stars.

In other words, "Did Jesus die for Klingons too?" as philosophy professor Christian Weidemannof Germany's Ruhr-University Bochum titled his talk at a panel on the philosophical and religious considerations of visiting other worlds.

"According to Christianity, an historic event some 2,000 years ago was supposed to save the whole of creation," Weidemann said. "You can grasp the conflict."

Here's how the debate goes: If the whole of creation includes 125 billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each, as astronomers think, then what if some of these stars have planets with advanced civilizations, too? Why would Jesus Christ have come to Earth, of all the inhabited planets in the universe, to save Earthlings and abandon the rest of God's creatures?
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Telescope

'Darkest' world enlightens astronomers about mysterious light-gobbling planet


PhysOrg
Sun, 02 Oct 2011 06:04 UTC
Light-gobbling planet
© David A. Aguilar, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for AstrophysicsAstronomers from Princeton University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics found that the distant exoplanet TrES-2b -- shownhere in an artist's conception -- likely absorbs 99.9 percent of the light that strikes it, making it the most light-thirsty object in the known universe. The findings may help astronomers better understand a mysterious characteristic of similar planets found outside our solar system.

A giant Jupiter-like gas planet has been revealed to be the most light-thirsty object in the known universe -- a finding that may help astronomers better understand a mysterious characteristic of similar planets found outside our solar system.

Recent analysis on a planet dubbed TrES-2b has found that it probably absorbs 99.9 percent of the light that strikes it, more than any other known cosmic entity, according to a report by Princeton University's David Spiegel, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, and lead author David Kipping, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the paper not only identifies the planet as the "darkest" world yet observed, but also sets a new standard in determining just how much light "hot Jupiter" planets -- scorching balls of hydrogen and helium already known for being non-reflective -- can keep to themselves.

TrES-2b, which was discovered in 2006, is one of roughly 150 hot Jupiter planets known to exist outside our solar system. Astronomers are working to better understand the sometimes mysterious properties of these "dark" planets, from their mass to their orbital patterns to their atmospheric makeup.
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Info

'Dumb' Neanderthals Likely Had a Smart Diet

Charles Q. Choi
LiveScience
Sat, 01 Oct 2011 13:03 UTC
Neanderthal Family
© NASA/JPL-CaltechA Neanderthal Family.


Instead of Neanderthals being dim-witted hunters who only dined on big game, new findings suggest they had more balanced diets, with broad menus that may have included birds, fish and plants.

Neanderthals are currently our closest known extinct relatives, near enough to modern humans to interbreed, with Neanderthal DNA making up 1 percent to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes. A host of recent findings suggest they were not only close genetically, but may have shared many other traits with us, such as creating art.

Still, the term "Neanderthal" has long been synonymous with "stupid."

"Since they went extinct, conventional wisdom says they were dumber than us," said researcher Bruce Hardy, a paleoanthropologist at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.
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Satellite

Heavy Metal Stars Produce Earth-Like Planets

Nola Taylor Redd
PhysOrg
Fri, 30 Sep 2011 10:00 UTC
Image
© Daniel FabryckyNASA's Kepler has discovered 1,235 candidate planets orbiting 997 stars.
New research reveals that, like their giant cousins, rocky planets are more likely to be found orbiting high metallicity stars. Furthermore, these planets are more plentiful around low mass stars. This could have important implications for the search for life outside of Earth.

Kevin Schlaufman and Gregory Laughlin, both of the University of California at Santa Cruz, studied the 997 stars with candidate planets thought to be in orbit around them, as reported by Kepler's science team last February. Schlaufman and Laughlin confirmed that both large and small planets were more likely to be found around stars with higher metallicities.

For astronomers, elements other than hydrogen and helium are considered "metals." Stars with high metallicities contain a significant amount of other elements. These metals were first formed when early stars, composed of the two basic gases hydrogen and helium, died in a violent supernova, spewing their contents into space.
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Telescope

Cosmic Thread That Binds Us Revealed


PhysOrg
Thu, 29 Sep 2011 06:00 UTC
Astronomers at The Australian National University have found evidence for the textile that forms the fabric of the Universe.

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© Michael Boylan-Kolchin/University of California IrvineSimulated view of the interconnecting filaments between galaxies.
In findings published in the October Astrophysical Journal, the researchers discovered proof of a vast filament of material that connects our Milky Way galaxy to nearby clusters of galaxies, which are similarly interconnected to the rest of the Universe.

The team included Dr. Stefan Keller, Dr. Dougal Mackey and Professor Gary Da Costa from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at ANU.

"By examining the positions of ancient groupings of stars, called globular clusters, we found that the clusters form a narrow plane around the Milky Way rather than being scattered across the sky," Dr. Keller said.
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Bulb

Dramatic Scope of Epigenetic Changes: Johns Hopkins Scientists Discover "Fickle" DNA Changes in Brain


Johns Hopkins Medicine
Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:16 UTC
Image
© Max SongAuthors of this study include the husband-wife team of Hongjun Song and Guo-li Ming; their 13-year-old son Max interpreted their discovery with an original Chinese landscape painting that appears on the current cover of Nature Neuroscience (October edition).
Finding has implications for treatment of wide range of diseases.

Johns Hopkins scientists investigating chemical modifications across the genomes of adult mice have discovered that DNA modifications in non-dividing brain cells, thought to be inherently stable, instead underwent large-scale dynamic changes as a result of stimulated brain activity. Their report, in the October issue of Nature Neuroscience, has major implications for treating psychiatric diseases, neurodegenerative disorders, and for better understanding learning, memory and mood regulation.

Specifically, the researchers, who include a husband-and-wife team, found evidence of an epigenetic change called demethylation - the loss of a methyl group from specific locations - in the non-dividing brain cells' DNA, challenging the scientific dogma that even if the DNA in non-dividing adult neurons changes on occasion from methylated to demethylated state, it does so very infrequently.
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