Science & TechnologyS


Blackbox

Eqypt's Antiquities Boss Zahi Hawass Is Sacked?

Ansrew Lawler
Science Insider
Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:22 UTC
Image
© UnknownZahi Hawass
After nearly a decade as chief of Egypt's antiquities, Zahi Hawass is now out of a job.

The 64-year-old archaeologist was fired yesterday by Prime Minister Essam Sharaf as part of a wider shakeup of his cabinet. Protestors at Cairo's Tahrir Square had been calling for his ouster as minister of antiquities for months. "All the devils united against me," Hawass told Science Insider.

The country's most prominent figure in archaeology, Hawass was instrumental in sending large blockbuster exhibits abroad, creating a host of new museums and secure storerooms, and pressuring foreign excavators to publish their finds more quickly. But he was also criticized for his portrayal on American television of archaeology as treasure hunting, excoriated for his dictatorial management style, and accused of shoddy research in carrying out his own digs. Sharaf is said to have appointed Abdel-Fattah El-Banna as Hawass' replacement, but there are reports that protestors have rejected that nomination, and that Sharaf might reverse his decision and name someone else.
Read More...
Info

How a Mission to Mars Could Kill You

Eric Niiler
Discovery News
Mon, 18 Jul 2011 06:00 UTC
Mars Colonisation
© NASAA manned mission to Mars will push human ingenuity into the next frontier of space exploration, but are the health risks worth it?
Will bootprints in the Martian soil be a part of our future, or will the interplanetary trip prove too hazardous for humans?

When NASA's 30-year Space Shuttle Program ends on Thursday as Atlantis touches down for the last time, space-watchers will be looking toward our next step into space.

We've already 'done' the moon, but Mars still beckons like some interplanetary Brigadoon; visible through the eyes of clever little rovers and orbiters, but just beyond the reach of human footsteps.

Despite several decades of research and development, a long-duration voyage to Mars is still on the drawing board. Putting aside the enormous financial costs of an interplanetary mission, there are still major engineering and physiological hurdles to overcome.
Read More...
Question

All Non-Africans Part Neanderthal, Genetics Confirm

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:25 UTC
Neanderthal Reconstruction
© iStockPhotoA museum reconstruction of a Neanderthal.

If your heritage is non-African, you are part Neanderthal, according to a new study in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution. Discovery News has been reporting on human/Neanderthal interbreeding for some time now, so this latest research confirms earlier findings.

Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal's Department of Pediatrics and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center conducted the study with his colleagues. They determined some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals, but only in people of non-African heritage.

"This confirms recent findings suggesting that the two populations interbred," Labuda was quoted as saying in a press release. His team believes most, if not all, of the interbreeding took place in the Middle East, while modern humans were migrating out of Africa and spreading to other regions.

The ancestors of Neanderthals left Africa about 400,000 to 800,000 years ago. They evolved over the millennia mostly in what are now France, Spain, Germany and Russia. They went extinct, or were simply absorbed into the modern human population, about 30,000 years ago.

Neanderthals possessed the gene for language and had sophisticated music, art and tool craftsmanship skills, so they must have not been all that unattractive to modern humans at the time.
Read More...
Gear

CERN 'Gags' Physicists in Cosmic Ray Climate Experiment

Andrew Orlowski
The Register, UK
Mon, 18 Jul 2011 10:01 UTC
Cosmic rays
© The Register, UK12m muons pass through your body every 24 hours.

The chief of the world's leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions from a major experiment. The CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets") experiment examines the role that energetic particles from deep space play in cloud formation. CLOUD uses CERN's proton synchrotron to examine nucleation.

CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Welt Online that the scientists should refrain from drawing conclusions from the latest experiment.

"I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them," reports veteran science editor Nigel Calder on his blog. Why?

Because, Heuer says, "That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters."
Read More...
Bizarro Earth

Volcanic Eruptions Long Overdue Down Under

Katherine Tweed
OurAmazingPlanet
Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:26 UTC
Mt.Gambier
© NASASitting near Australia’s rugged southern coast, the South Australian town of Mount Gambier is built on the side of an extinct volcano that last erupted between 4,300 and 28,000 years ago. Since that time, the caldera of the volcano has filled with rainwater, forming a very deep lake that provides the town with water. The large caldera lake is called Blue Lake due to a rather peculiar characteristic: the water turns a brilliant cobalt blue during the summer and early fall (approximately November-March).

Australia is often called the oldest continent on Earth because of the lack of historic geologic upheaval that marks other areas of the world. But its hushed tectonic activity doesn't mean Australia is asleep.

There are various volcanic clusters Down Under and new research suggests that some of the youngest volcanoes are long overdue for an eruption.

The Newer Volcanics Province (NVP), located in Western Victoria and southeastern South Australia, is a 5,800-square-mile (15,000 square kilometer) area that consists of hundreds of small cones, lava shields and craters that have been mapped in detail over the years. Research from the University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences and the Melbourne School of Engineering has found that volcanoes in the NVP were fairly active in the last 20,000 to 30,000 years, with an eruption frequency about every 2,000 years.

The volcanic area is what is termed monogenetic, meaning that when one of the volcanoes blows, it does so only once, so the older cones that have erupted aren't a worry; it is the youngest, new volcanoes that are a threat. The last eruption, at Mount Gambier in South Australia, was about 5,500 years ago, suggesting that the region is overdue for an eruption.
Read More...
Magnify

Parasitism: Wasp Uses Ladybug as "Zombie Bodyguard"


ScienceDaily
Mon, 18 Jul 2011 06:00 UTC
Image
© Mathieu Bélanger Morin –CNRS/IRDThe larva breaking through the ladybug's abdomen.
The parasitic wasp Dinocampus coccinellae is no fool. It controls a ladybug, lays an egg in its abdomen and turns it into the bodyguard of its cocoon. This surprising host-parasite manipulation has been observed and analyzed by researchers from the Laboratoire Maladies Infectieuses et VectAlthough this strategy enables the wasps to protect their larvae from predation, it has a cost: the wasps pay for it in terms of fertility. The researchers have also demonstrated the reversible character of this manipulation: once the larvae have hatched, some ladybugs can recover normal behavior.

This work is published online in the journal Biology Letters.

Dinocampus coccinellae is a common parasitic wasp of the spotted lady beetle Coleomegilla maculata. Females deposit a single egg in the abdomen of their host, the ladybug, and during larval development (around twenty days) the parasite feeds on the host's tissues. Then, the wasp larva breaks out through the ladybug's abdomen, without killing it, and begins spinning a cocoon between the ladybug's legs. The ladybug, partially paralyzed, is forced to stand guard over the cocoon.

The novel manipulation strategy is intriguing in several ways: whereas the immense majority of parasitic wasps kill their host while they grow, the ladybug parasited by D. coccinellae remains alive. In addition, the behavioral manipulation occurs once the larva has left its host.
Read More...
Magnify

The Face of a Frog: Time-Lapse Video Reveals Never-Before-Seen Bioelectric Pattern


ScienceDaily
Mon, 18 Jul 2011 06:00 UTC
Image
© Tufts UniversityEmbryonic tadpole. For the first time, biologists have reported that bioelectrical signals are necessary for normal head and facial formation in an organism.
For the first time, Tufts University biologists have reported that bioelectrical signals are necessary for normal head and facial formation in an organism and have captured that process in a time-lapse video that reveals never-before-seen patterns of visible bioelectrical signals outlining where eyes, nose, mouth, and other features will appear in an embryonic tadpole.

The Tufts research with accompanying video and photographs will appear July 18 online in advance of publication in the journal Developmental Dynamics.

The Tufts biologists found that, before the face of a tadpole develops, bioelectrical signals (ion flux) cause groups of cells to form patterns marked by different membrane voltage and pH levels. When stained with a reporter dye, hyperpolarized (negatively charged) areas shine brightly, while other areas appear darker, creating an "electric face."
Read More...
Meteor

Comet Hartley 2 Leaves a Bumpy Trail


ScienceDaily
Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLAComet Hartley 2 as seen by WISE. Data from the infrared telescope revealed that the comet's trail, seen here as the long, thin yellow line, consists of particles as large as golf balls.
New findings from NEOWISE, the asteroid- and comet-hunting portion of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission, show that comet Hartley 2 leaves a pebbly trail as it laps the sun, dotted with grains as big as golf balls.

Previously, NASA's EPOXI mission, which flew by the comet on Nov. 4, 2010, found golf ball- to basketball-sized fluffy ice particles streaming off comet Hartley 2. NEOWISE data show that the golf ball-sized chunks survive farther away from the comet than previously known, winding up in Hartley 2's trail of debris. The NEOWISE team determined the size of these particles by looking at how far they deviated from the trail. Larger particles are less likely to be pushed away from the trail by radiation pressure from the sun.

The observations also show that the comet is still actively ejecting carbon dioxide gas at a distance of 2.3 astronomical units from the sun, which is farther away from the sun than where EPOXI detected carbon dioxide jets streaming from the comet. An astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and the sun.

"We were surprised that carbon dioxide plays a significant role in comet Hartley 2's activity when it's farther away from the sun," said James Bauer, the lead author of a new paper on the result in the Astrophysical Journal.
Read More...
Blackbox

When Minor Planets Ceres and Vesta Rock the Earth into Chaos


Space Daily/SPX
Sun, 17 Jul 2011 20:00 UTC
Image
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDAVesta. NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on July 1, 2011. It was taken from a distance about 100,000 kilometers away from Vesta.
Astronomy and Astrophysics is publishing a new study of the orbital evolution of minor planets Ceres and Vesta, a few days before the flyby of Vesta by the Dawn spacecraft. A team of astronomers found that close encounters among these bodies lead to strong chaotic behavior of their orbits, as well as of the Earth's eccentricity. This means, in particular, that the Earth's past orbit cannot be reconstructed beyond 60 million years.

Astronomy and Astrophysics is publishing numerical simulations of the long-term evolution of the orbits of minor planets Ceres and Vesta, which are the largest bodies in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is 6000 times less massive than the Earth and almost 80 times less massive than our Moon. Vesta is almost four times less massive than Ceres.

These two minor bodies, long thought to peacefully orbit in the asteroid belt, are found to affect their large neighbors and, in particular, the Earth in a way that had not been anticipated. This is showed in the new astronomical computations released by Jacques Laskar from Paris Observatory and his colleagues.
Read More...
Info

Radioactive Decay Fuels Earth's Inner Fires

Charles Q. Choi
OurAmazingPlanet
Sun, 17 Jul 2011 13:48 UTC
Earth's Core
© Lawrence Berkeley National LaboratoryA main source of the 44 trillion watts of heat that flows from the interior of the Earth is the decay of radioactive isotopes in the mantle and crust. Scientists using the KamLAND neutrino detector in Japan have measured how much heat is generated this way by capturing geoneutrinos released during radioactive decay.

Half of the extraordinary heat of the Earth that erupts on its surface volcanically and drives the titanic motions of the continents is due to radioactivity, scientists find.

This new discovery shows that the planet still retains an extraordinary amount of heat it had from its primordial days.

To better understand the sources of the Earth's heat, scientists studied antineutrinos, elementary particles that, like their neutrino counterparts, only rarely interact with normal matter. Using the Kamioka Liquid-scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) located under a mountain in Japan, they analyzed geoneutrinos - ones emitted by decaying radioactive materials within the Earth - over the course of more than seven years.

The specific amount of energy an antineutrino packs on the rare occasions one does collide with normal matter can tell scientists about what material emitted it in the first place - for instance, radioactive material from within the Earth, as opposed to in nuclear reactors. If one also knows how rarely such an antineutrino interacts with normal matter, one can then estimate how many antineutrinos are being emitted and how much energy they are carrying in total.
Read More...