Science & TechnologyS


Snowflake

US, Russia to Conduct Joint Antarctica Inspection


Agence France Presse
Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© AFP Photo/Philippe SiuberskiA village of tents, where scientist sleep, is seen in front of the Belgian Princess Elisabeth polar station in Usteinen, Antarctica in 2009.
The United States and Russia will jointly inspect foreign facilities in Antarctica to make sure environmental and other responsibilities under the 1959 Antarctica Treaty are being met, the State Department said Saturday.

A US-Russian team will travel to Antarctica January 23-28 to check foreign stations, installations and equipment, it said.

"The US-Russian team will review adherence by treaty parties to their obligations, including with respect to limiting environmental impacts, ensuring that Antarctica is used only for peaceful purposes and that parties honor the prohibition on measures of a military nature," it said.
Read More...
Info

Motor Made of DNA Runs on Tracks

Jesse Emspak
Discovery News
Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:11 UTC
DNA Motor
© Adrian Neal/Getty Images

DNA has been made into tiny robots and self-replicating machines. Now it's been made into a tiny motor.

A team at Kyoto University and the University of Oxford has used DNA as the building blocks for a motor that runs along tiny tracks. The tracks all have switches and the network is programmable -- just like a computer.

The DNA is manipulated with a technique called "DNA origami." Just like its paper counterpart, this method uses DNA to fold structures into two and three dimensions. The folding of the molecules is done via sequencing in such a way that the DNA naturally self-assembles into the desired shape. The tiny tracks were laid down on top of tiles, also made of DNA.

The DNA "motors" run along the tracks, and since you can program the way the tracks are laid down, the whole system can carry information the same way electrons do in a computer's circuits. Essentially it's a DNA-powered computer.
Read More...
Info

How Neutrons Might Escape Into Another Universe


Technology Review, MIT
Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:11 UTC
Universe Jump
© Technology Review, MIT

The idea that our universe is embedded in a broader multidimensional space has captured the imagination of scientists and the general population alike.

This notion is not entirely science fiction. According to some theories, our cosmos may exist in parallel with other universes in other sets of dimensions. Cosmologists call these universes braneworlds. And among that many prospects that this raises is the idea that things from our Universe might somehow end up in another.

A couple of years ago, Michael Sarrazin at the University of Namur in Belgium and a few others showed how matter might make the leap in the presence of large magnetic potentials. That provided a theoretical basis for real matter swapping.

Today, Sarrazin and a few pals say that our galaxy might produce a magnetic potential large enough to make this happen for real. If so, we ought to be able to observe matter leaping back and forth between universes in the lab. In fact, such observations might already have been made in certain experiments.

The experiments in question involve trapping ultracold neutrons in bottles at places like the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble, France, and the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. Ultracold neutrons move so slowly that it is possible to trap them using 'bottles' made of magnetic fields, ordinary matter and even gravity.
Read More...
Info

Oldest Dinosaur 'Nursery' Discovered

Charles Choi
Live Science
Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:00 UTC
Dino Nursery
© Artwork by Julius CsotonyiThis artist's interpretation shows 190-million-year-old nests, eggs, hatchlings and adults of the prosauropod dinosaur Massospondylus in Golden Gate Highlands National Park, South Africa. While the mother dinos likely were 20 feet (6 meters) long, while their eggs were only 2.3 - 2.7 inches (6 to 7 cm) wide.
Tiny prints from baby dinosaurs dot the oldest dino nesting site found to date, a 190-million-year-old nursery in South Africa, researchers said.

The hatchery and the baby footprints uncovered there are significant clues about the evolution of complex family behaviors in early dinosaurs, providing the oldest-known evidence that dinosaur hatchlings remained at nests long enough to at least double in size.

The newly unearthed clutches of eggs, many with embryos inside, belonged to the plant-eating dinosaur Massospondylus, a prosauropod, or predecessor of the largest animals to ever walk the Earth, long-necked sauropods such as Brachiosaurus.
Read More...
Chalkboard

'Electric Earth' Could Explain Planet's Rotation

Kate McAlpine
Science
Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:58 UTC
disk of iron monoxide
© Kenji OhtaUnder pressure. The disk of iron monoxide (FeO) inside the diamond anvil, connected to gold (Au) electrodes.
When it comes to Earth's rotation, you might think geophysicists have pretty much everything figured out. Not quite. In order to explain some variations in the way our planet spins, Earth's mantle - the layer of hot, softened rock that lies between the crust and core - must conduct electricity, an ability that the mantle as we know it shouldn't have. Now, a new study finds that iron monoxide, which makes up 9% of the mantle, actually does conduct electricity just like a metal, but only at temperatures and pressures found far beneath the surface.

Earth's spin isn't flawless. Geophysicists have discovered that the time it takes our planet to complete one rotation - the length of a day - fluctuates slightly over the course of months or years. They've also noticed extra swing in the predictable wobble of Earth's axis of rotation, like the swaying of a spinning top. The variations are probably caused by the solid iron inner core, liquid metal outer core, and rocky mantle rotating at slightly different rates. Friction helps bring them into line, and the magnetic field of the outer core can pull on the metal inner core. But to really fit the observations, the core should also exert its magnetic tug on the mantle, says Bruce Buffett, an earth scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study. This means that a layer of the mantle must be able to conduct electricity. But, he says, "the origin of the metallic layer remains an open question."
Read More...
Meteor

International Organization To Assess Earth Defense From Space Dangers

Jonathan Amos
BBC News
Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:40 UTC
asteroid/Earth
© NASA/JPL/JHUAPL
NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision path with our planet.

The effort is being led from the German space agency's (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, and had its kick-off meeting this week.

It will draw on expertise from across Europe, Russia and the US.

It's a major EU-funded initiative that will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory experiments and new modelling work, and then try to come to some definitive positions.

Industrial partners, which include the German, British and French divisions of the big Astrium space company, will consider the engineering architecture required to deflect one of these bodies out of our path.

Should we kick it, try to tug it, or even blast it off its trajectory?
Read More...
Satellite

Russian Mars Probe Crash Sets Off Confusion, Conspiracy Theories

Denise Chow
Space.com
Sat, 21 Jan 2012 06:00 UTC
failed Mars probe Phobos-Grunt
© Michael CarrollThis artist's concept shows fuel from Russia's failed Mars probe Phobos-Grunt burning from a ruptured fuel tank as the spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere.
When an ill-fated Russian Mars probe fell to Earth over the weekend, the spacecraft's untimely demise set off a flurry of conflicting media reports and conspiracy theories.

Russia's Phobos-Grunt space probe suffered a debilitating malfunction shortly after its November 2011 launch, which stranded it in low-Earth orbit for more than two months before it succumbed to gravitational forces and plummeted through the atmosphere on Jan. 15.

The $165 million spacecraft reportedly broke apart over the Pacific Ocean, but inconsistent reports soon surfaced, which sparked different theories about where the probe had landed, and what had caused it to malfunction in the first place.

The Russian Federal Space Agency is notorious for closely controlling any information released, but part of the issue is the tricky nature of calculating re-entry predictions for dead satellites and other pieces of orbital debris.
Read More...
Cards

What If There Were Another Advanced Species?

Natalie Wolchover
MSNBC
Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:55 UTC
Apes planet
© 20th Century FoxStill from Planet of the Apes, a 2001 film.
Would we break bread with our brainy cohabitants or be locked in battle?

What if Neanderthals, who bit the dust just 28,000 years ago, had instead wised up and were now living next door? Or what if, during all these millennia that humans have been evolving, some unrelated creature had evolved cognitive and technological prowess in keeping with our own? Another scenario: what if humans had split into two separate species - the original gangsters, and a successful evolutionary offshoot?

These are all perfectly reasonable histories of the world that would have resulted in two advanced species of Earthlings living side-by-side today. They're just not the histories that happen to have happened.

But what if they had? Would we break bread with our brainy cohabitants or be locked in a constant battle for supremacy?
Read More...
Nuke

In This Nuclear World, What Is the Meaning of "Safe"?

Barbara Rose Johnston
Truthout
Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:55 UTC
empty streets of Minamisoma
© Ko Sasaki / The New York TimesThe empty streets of Minamisoma, a city near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Thousands of Japanese are stranded near the stricken reactors and residents are criticizing the government’s lack of help.
In a nuclear crisis, life becomes a nightmare for those people trying to make sense of the uncertainties. Imaginably, the questions are endless.

Radiation is invisible, how do you know when you are in danger? How long will this danger persist? How can you reduce the hazard to yourself and family? What level of exposure is safe? How do you get access to vital information in time to prevent or minimize exposure? What are the potential risks of acute and chronic exposures? What are the related consequential damages of exposure? Whose information do you trust? How do you rebuild a healthy way of life in the aftermath of nuclear disaster?

And the list of unknowns goes on.

These questions are difficult to answer in the chaos and context of an ongoing disaster, and they become even more complicated by the fact that governments and the nuclear industry maintain tight control of information, operations, scientific research, and the biomedical lessons that shape public-health response.
Read More...
UFO 2

Mystery Surrounds Air Force's Secretive X-37B Space Plane Landing Plan

Mike Wall
Space.com
Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:07 UTC
X-37B
© USAF/Vandenberg Air Force BaseAn Air Force photographer snapped this profile view of the X-37B shortly after its landing on Dec. 3, 2010, which marked the end of the secret vehicle's maiden space mission.
The United States Air Force's secretive X-37B space plane has been circling Earth for more than 10 months, and there's no telling when it might come down.

As of Friday (Jan. 20), the mysterious robotic X-37B spacecraft has been aloft for 321 days, significantly outlasting its stated mission design lifetime of 270 days. But it may stay up for even longer yet, experts say, particularly if the military views this space mission - the second ever for the hush-hush vehicle - as something of an endurance test.

"Because it is an experimental vehicle, they kind of want to see what its limits are," said Brian Weeden, a technical adviser with the Secure World Foundation and a former orbital analyst with the Air Force.

A long mystery mission

The Air Force launched the X-37B in March 2011, sending the reusable space plane design on its second space mission. The X-37B now zipping around our planet is known as Orbital Test Vehicle-2, or OTV-2.
Read More...