Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Dragonfish nebula conceals giant star cluster

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© NASA/JPL-Caltech/GLIMPSE Team/M Rahman/U of Toronto
Dragonfish are fearsome deep-sea predators with giant mouths, bulging eyes and a propensity for eating bioluminescent prey. Now it seems they have a celestial counterpart in the Dragonfish nebula. Hidden in its gaping maw may be the Milky Way's most massive cluster of young stars.

Mubdi Rahman and Norman Murray, both of the University of Toronto in Canada, found the first hint of the cluster in 2010 in the form of a big cloud of ionised gas 30,000 light years from Earth. They picked up the gas by its microwave emissions - suspecting that radiation from massive stars nearby had ionised the gas.

Now Rahman and his colleagues have identified a knot of 400 massive stars in the cloud's heart in images from the infrared 2 Micron All Sky Survey (Astrophysical Journal Letters, in press). The cluster probably contains many more stars too small and dim to see.

Sun

Sunspot Sunrise: Sunspot Complex 1147-1149

Sunspot complex 1147-1149 is so big, people are beginning to notice it without the aid of a solar telescope. Stefano De Rosa "spotted" the twin cores at sunrise on Jan. 23rd:

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© Stefano De Rosa
"The sun was climbing a hill by the Basilica of Superga," says De Rosa. "[Because the low-hanging sun was so dim], we could see the sunspots above the treeline."

Caution: Even when the sun is dimmed by clouds or low altitude, it is still dangerously bright. Direct sunlight beaming through the optics of cameras can instantly damage your eyes. If you attempt to photograph the sun using a digital camera, do not peer through the viewfinder. The LCD screen is a safer place to look. The links below are safest of all; browse and enjoy.

Sherlock

Dating sheds new light on dawn of the dinosaurs

Careful dating of new dinosaur fossils and volcanic ash around them by researchers from UC Davis and UC Berkeley casts doubt on the idea that dinosaurs appeared and opportunistically replaced other animals. Instead -- at least in one South American valley -- they seem to have existed side by side and gone through similar periods of extinction.

Geologists from Argentina and the United States announced earlier this month the discovery of a new dinosaur that roamed what is now South America 230 million years ago, at the beginning of the age of the dinosaurs. The newly discovered Eodramaeus, or "dawn runner," was a predatory dinosaur that walked (or ran) on two legs and weighed 10 to 15 pounds. The new fossil was described in a paper by Ricardo Martinez of the Universidad Nacional de San Juan, Argentina, and colleagues in the journal Science Jan. 14.

The fossils come from a valley in the foothills of the Andes in northwestern Argentina. More than 200 million years ago, it was a rift valley on the western edge of the supercontinent Pangaea, surrounded by volcanoes. It's one of the few places in the world where a piece of tectonically active continental margin has been preserved, said Isabel Montañez, a UC Davis geology professor and a co-author of the Science paper.

Montañez, with Brian Currie from Miami University, Ohio, and Paul Renne at UC Berkeley's Geochronology Center, have conducted earlier studies of the ancient soils from the valley, dating layers of ash and researching how the climate changed. Those climate studies have been published previously.

Laptop

Broadband Cable on its Way to Unplugged Cuba

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© Ramon Espinosa / Associated PressCubans look at computers in Havana. Soon they should be able to get speedy internet connections to go with them.
Fibre-optic cable laid from Venezuela brings the promise of speedy internet to one of the world's least connected countries

Cuba is set to join the high-speed broadband era with an undersea fibre-optic cable laid from Venezuela, bringing the promise of speedy internet to one of the world's least connected countries.

A specialised ship sailed from Camuri beach, near the Venezuelan port of La Guaria, this weekend, trailing the cable from buoys on the start of a 1,000-mile journey across the Caribbean sea.

Venezuelan and Cuban officials hailed the project as a blow to the United States' embargo on the island. It will make Cuba's connection speed 3,000 times faster and modernise its economy.

"This means a giant step for the independence and sovereignty of our people," Rogelio Polanco, Cuba's ambassador to Caracas, said at a pomp-filled ceremony in tropical sunshine.

The ship, Ile de Batz, owned by the French company Alcatel-Lucent, will lay the cable at depths of up to 5,800 metres and is expected to reach eastern Cuba by 8 February. Cuba's government said the cable should be in use by June or July.

Cuba has some censorship restrictions but the impact could be profound. The country has just 14.2 internet users per 100 people, the western hemisphere's lowest ratio, with access largely restricted to government offices, universities, foreign companies and tourist hotels.

The 50-year-old US embargo prevented Cuba tapping into Caribbean fibre-optic cables, forcing it to rely on a slow, expensive satellite link of just 379 megabits per second.

X

Toxic Ash Clouds Might Be Culprit in Biggest Mass Extinction

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© Grasby et al., Nature Geoscience Spark. The tiny, frothy particles found in ancient Canadian rocks (left), which are similar to the particles of fly ash from today's coal-fired power plants (right), might have helped trigger the mass extinction that struck Earth 250 million years ago.
Tiny particles embedded in ancient Canadian rocks have provided new clues about what might have triggered Earth's deadliest mass extinction. The ultimate cause, researchers say, might be globe-smothering clouds of toxic ash similar to that spewed by modern-day coal-fired power plants.

The die-off, which occurred worldwide about 250 million years ago at the end of the Permian period, was even more extensive than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. More than 90% of marine species went extinct, and land-based ecosystems suffered almost as much. Scientists have long debated the reasons. Favorite hypotheses include an asteroid impact, massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia, and toxic oceans. Geochemist Stephen Grasby of the Geological Survey of Canada in Calgary and colleagues report online today in Nature Geoscience a new twist on the volcano notion.

Dollar

Best of the Web: The downfall of science and the rise of intellectual tyranny

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The very reputation of so-called "science" has been irreparably damaged by the invocation of the term "science" by GMO lackeys, pesticide pushers, mercury advocates and fluoride poisoners who all claim to have science on their side. It seems that every toxin, contamination and chemical disaster that now infects our planet has been evangelized in the name of "science."

Where "science" used to be highly regarded in the 1950's, today the term is largely exploited by pharmaceutical companies, biotech giants and chemical companies to push their own for-profit agendas. Actual science has little to do with the schemes now being pushed under the veil of science.

To make matters even worse for the sciences, many so-called "science bloggers" have been revealed to have financial ties to the very same companies whose profits are shored up by their activities.

Rather than defending any sort of scientific truth, science bloggers have become the internet whores of Big Pharma, Monsanto, pesticide manufacturers, chemical companies and toxic mercury factories. There's hardly a dangerous chemical in widespread use today that the science bloggers haven't venomously defended as safe and effective. Many are just blatantly paid off by corporate entities to run around the internet pushing GMOs, chemicals and vaccines.

Sun

Beautiful Omega Sunset

"Last night's sunset was an amazing sight," reports Pete Lawrence from West Beach in Selsey, UK. "As the sun approached the horizon, the lower half of the solar disk extended downwards to touch an image of itself rising out of the waves." He took this picture of the phenomenon:

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© Pete Lawrence
Jules Verne famously likened this kind of sunset to an Etruscan Vase. Others call it an "Omega sunset" because it resembles the Greek letter. Either way, it is caused by warm air overlying the sea surface, which refracts the rays of the setting sun to produce a mirage, as shown.

Sun

The biggest sunspots of the year are putting on a show

The biggest sunspots of the year are putting on a show for amateur astronomers. From his backyard observatory in Brazil, Rogerio Marcon photographed a maelstrom of hot gas swirling around the dark cores of AR1147-1149 on Jan. 22nd:

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© Rogerio Marcon
"I took the picture using a small refracting telescope and an H-alpha filter tuned to the red glow of solar hydrogen," explains Marcon.

Sunspot 1149 (the southern half of the complex) has a tangled magnetic field that harbors energy for strong flares. NOAA forecasters estimate a 10% chance of M-class eruptions during the next 24 hours. Readers with solar telescopes should continue to monitor the region for explosive developments.

Bizarro Earth

Researchers Find Smoking Gun of World's Biggest Extinction

Dr. Stephen Grasby
© Courtesy of University of CalgaryDr. Stephen Grasby at Buchanan Lake, Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut, where recent discovery of coal ash layers provide the first direct evidence of significant coal fires at the Latest Permian Extinction.

About 250 million years about 95 per cent of life was wiped out in the sea and 70 per cent on land. Researchers at the University of Calgary believe they have discovered evidence to support massive volcanic eruptions burnt significant volumes of coal, producing ash clouds that had broad impact on global oceans.

"This could literally be the smoking gun that explains the latest Permian extinction," says Dr. Steve Grasby, adjunct professor in the University of Calgary's Department of Geoscience and research scientist at Natural Resources Canada.

Grasby and colleagues discovered layers of coal ash in rocks from the extinction boundary in Canada's High Arctic that give the first direct proof to support this and have published their findings in Nature Geoscience.

Unlike end of dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, where there is widespread belief that the impact of a meteorite was at least the partial cause, it is unclear what caused the late Permian extinction. Previous researchers have suggested massive volcanic eruptions through coal beds in Siberia would generate significant greenhouse gases causing run away global warming.

Butterfly

Do Bees do a better Democracy then us?

The insect world apparently a better grasp of communal decision making than homo sapiens