Science & TechnologyS


Meteor

Getting a Handle on Cosmic Dust Caused by Supernovas

Image
© Pasquale PanuzzoAn infrared image of supernova 1987A, taken by the Herschel Space Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope.
Although it is known that a supernova, the violent explosion of a star, is one source of cosmic dust, the origin of the large amounts of dust needed to form planets and stars like the Sun has long been unclear.

Now, with the aid of the European Space Association's powerful Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers have been able to detect massive amounts of cosmic dust emitted from a supernova almost 25 years ago.

"We are looking at the sky at wavelengths that have never been observed before," said Mikako Matsuura, an astronomer at University College London and the study's lead author.

She and her colleagues report their findings in the journal Science.

Green Light

Road legal at last: The flying car finally gets its driving licence after years of delays

It's been cleared to take to the skies for more than a year - but that's not much use when you're supposed to be able to drive it, too.

But now the flying car has at least been declared officially road legal.

It means the Terrafugia Transition could be in U.S. garages as early as next autumn, after two years of delays.

flying car
Ready to go: The Terrafugia Transition has finally been declared road legal, and it could be in U.S. garages as early as next year. It was first developed in 2009, but has faced years of hold-up

It may not be the world's first flying car, but its makers say it is the first to have wings that fold up automatically at the push of a button.

Telescope

U.S. Lawmakers Vote to Kill Hubble Telescope Successor

Hubble telescope
© n/a
In a fresh blow to NASA's post-shuttle aspirations, key US lawmakers voted Thursday to kill off funding for the successor to the vastly successful space-gazing Hubble telescope.

The US House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science approved by voice vote a yearly spending bill that includes no money for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The move -- spurred on by belt-tightening in cash-strapped Washington -- still requires the full committee's approval, the full House's approval, the Senate's approval, and ultimately President Barack Obama's signature.

But the relatively mild dissents in the committee, which said in a terse statement this week that the project "is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management," suggests the JWST faces an uphill fight to survive.

Bizarro Earth

New Force Driving Earth's Tectonic Plates Discovered

A view of the bends of the fracture zones
© Scripps Institution of Oceanography,UC San DiegoA view of the bends of the fracture zones on the Southwest Indian Ridge caused by the slowdown of Africa in response to the Reunion plume head. The image shows the gravity field.
Bringing fresh insight into long-standing debates about how powerful geological forces shape the planet, from earthquake ruptures to mountain formations, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have identified a new mechanism driving Earth's massive tectonic plates.

Scientists who study tectonic motions have known for decades that the ongoing "pull" and "push" movements of the plates are responsible for sculpting continental features around the planet. Volcanoes, for example, are generally located at areas where plates are moving apart or coming together. Scripps scientists Steve Cande and Dave Stegman have now discovered a new force that drives plate tectonics: Plumes of hot magma pushing up from Earth's deep interior. Their research is published in the July 7 issue of the journal Nature.

Using analytical methods to track plate motions through Earth's history, Cande and Stegman's research provides evidence that such mantle plume "hot spots," which can last for tens of millions of years and are active today at locations such as Hawaii, Iceland and the Galapagos, may work as an additional tectonic driver, along with push-pull forces.

Blackbox

The Birth of Religion

Image
© Vincent J. MusiPillars at the temple of Göbekli Tepe. We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.
Every now and then the dawn of civilization is reenacted on a remote hilltop in southern Turkey.

The reenactors are busloads of tourists - usually Turkish, sometimes European. The buses (white, air-conditioned, equipped with televisions) blunder over the winding, indifferently paved road to the ridge and dock like dreadnoughts before a stone portal. Visitors flood out, fumbling with water bottles and MP3 players. Guides call out instructions and explanations. Paying no attention, the visitors straggle up the hill. When they reach the top, their mouths flop open with amazement, making a line of perfect cartoon O's.

Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals - a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture - the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.

Telescope

Prominent Astrobiology Research Centre Sacked: An Interview with Chandra Wickramasinghe

Wickramasinghe
© K.G. DaviesChandra Wickramasinghe is a strong advocate for the theory that life originated beyond Earth.
Closed astrobiology centre to be reborn as private company.

The Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology in the United Kingdom is being closed by Cardiff University for what the university calls "budgetary and strategic reasons". Chandra Wickramasinghe, director of the centre, has said that he plans to turn it into a limited company. Nature asks him about his work, and how he intends to go it alone.

How did the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology come about?

The programme of research began in the 1970s in collaboration with the late Fred Hoyle. Until 1974 it was thought by the vast majority of astronomers that interstellar dust was all made of inorganic ice particles, similar to those in the cumulus clouds of Earth's atmosphere. We challenged these ideas and developed a theory of organic grains. By 1995, we were arguing that an origin of life on Earth is much less likely than life having an origin on a cosmic scale, that life is certain to have been brought to Earth from outside, most likely on comets. This idea of panspermia flew in the face of conventional wisdom, the model of the primordial soup.

Ours was one of the first astrobiology centres and today there are several universities around the US that have astrobiology departments.

What was your professional background when you got involved in this?

I was a professor of mathematics, and I was doing this research as a sort of hobby.

Comment: Isn't it strange how they would want to shut down such a cheap research program that has brought so much vital knowledge about the composition of comets, interstellar dust and diseases from space?

For more background see:

Catastrophist Theories of Life Gaining Ground: It Came From Outer Space

Mystery of India's "Red Rain" of 2001 Points to Extraterrestrial Origin

'Comets Responsible for Originating Life on Earth'

'Microbes from Venus could be reaching earth every 540 days'


Info

Pinocchio's Real Roots Mapped

Pinocchio
© Rossella Lorenzi / Gianni GrecoPinocchio, as the puppet appeared (without the long nose) in the serialized version of the story published in 1881.

The tale of the wooden puppet Pinocchio created by a carpenter in Florence may arguably be the most widely-known children's tale.

Now new research reveals that the story, written by Carlo Collodi 130 years ago on July 7, 1881, has deep roots in reality.

According to Alessandro Vegni, a computer expert, who has been comparing the tale with historic maps, the story of Pinocchio is set in the Tuscan village of San Miniato Basso, which lies midway between Pisa and Florence. The village's original name was actually "Pinocchio," according to the research.

The tale of Geppetto and his pine wood puppet, serialized in an Italian juvenile magazine under the title La Storia di un Burattino (The Story of a Marionette) in 1881, was turned into a book two years later called, The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Believed to be the second-most translated book after the Bible, the novel has inspired hundreds of new editions, stage plays, merchandising and movies, such as Walt Disney's iconic animated version.

But new details about the story's Florentine town setting reveal fascinating new details about the iconic work.

"The present name [of the village of San Miniato Basso] was given in 1924." Vegni said. "We know from historical records that the village was originally called 'Pinocchio,' probably after the stream that runs nearby."

Info

Alcohol's Memory Impairment Not Due to 'Killing Brain Cells'

Toast
© Live Science

A night of drinking and dancing can end in some fuzzy or missing memories of the evening, and researchers have long wondered why. Popular opinion blames the killing of brain cells, but new research finds that isn't true.

Very high alcohol levels can cause unconsciousness, by shutting down the parts of your brain that control your breathing. The new research looked at less serious but still heavy drinking and those frustrating blank spots in the memory that result.

"Alcohol isn't damaging the cells in any way that we can detect," said study researcher Charles Zorumski, of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "As a matter of fact, even at the high levels we used here, we don't see any changes in how the brain cells communicate."

So what happens?

"You still process information. You're not anesthetized. You haven't passed out," Zorumski said. "But you're not forming new memories."

Saturn

A Storm Circles Saturn so Fast, it Catches Up With Itself

Image
© NASA
Check out the most intense Saturn storm that the Cassini spacecraft has ever recorded. You can see it overtaking its own tail as it zooms around Saturn's Northern hemisphere. (The tail is the blue clouds to the South and West.)

The storm started months ago, and is still active today. The storm's surface area is eight times the surface area of our own planet. And at its most intense, the storm has generated more than 10 lightning flashes per second. It covers 500 times the area of the largest of the Southern hemisphere storms Cassini has observed - there were several storms in the Southern region scientists dubbed "storm alley," but the hemispheres flipped around August 2009, when the Northern hemisphere began experiencing spring.

Info

Where Did Early Cosmic Dust Come From? New Research Says Supernovae

Supernova
© ESA/NASA-JPL/UCL/STScI This layout compares two pictures of a supernova remnant called SN 1987A -- the left image was taken by the Herschel Space Observatory, and the right is an enlarged view of the circled region at left, taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

New observations from the infrared Herschel Space Observatory reveal that an exploding star expelled the equivalent of between 160,000 and 230,000 Earth masses of fresh dust. This enormous quantity suggests that exploding stars, called supernovae, are the answer to the long-standing puzzle of what supplied our early universe with dust.

"This discovery illustrates the power of tackling a problem in astronomy with different wavelengths of light," said Paul Goldsmith, the NASA Herschel project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who is not a part of the current study. "Herschel's eye for longer-wavelength infrared light has given us new tools for addressing a profound cosmic mystery."

Cosmic dust is made of various elements, such as carbon, oxygen, iron and other atoms heavier than hydrogen and helium. It is the stuff of which planets and people are made, and it is essential for star formation. Stars like our sun churn out flecks of dust as they age, spawning new generations of stars and their orbiting planets.