Science & TechnologyS


Laptop

Broadband Cable on its Way to Unplugged Cuba

Rory Carroll
The Guardian, UK
Sun, 23 Jan 2011 02:18 UTC
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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.
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X

Toxic Ash Clouds Might Be Culprit in Biggest Mass Extinction

Sid Perkins
Science NOW
Sun, 23 Jan 2011 13:06 UTC
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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.
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Dollar

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

Mike Adams
Natural News
Fri, 21 Jan 2011 06:42 UTC
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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.
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Sun

Beautiful Omega Sunset


Space Weather
Sun, 23 Jan 2011 13:28 UTC
"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.
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Sun

The biggest sunspots of the year are putting on a show


Space Weather
Sun, 23 Jan 2011 13:22 UTC
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.
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Bizarro Earth

Researchers Find Smoking Gun of World's Biggest Extinction


EurekaAlert
Sun, 23 Jan 2011 12:29 UTC
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.
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Butterfly

Do Bees do a better Democracy then us?

Thom Hartmann
YouTube
Thu, 20 Jan 2011 21:34 UTC
The insect world apparently a better grasp of communal decision making than homo sapiens

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Fish

Scientists Discover That Amoebas Have Developed Rudimentary Agriculture

Stephanie Pappas
Christian Science Monitor
Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:00 UTC
Amoeba agriculture
© NewscomThis photomicrograph of a slime mold shows an immature sorocarp (fruiting body), magnified 30x.
Once the amoebae reach their destination, slime molds seed the area with the bacteria, ensuring any amoeba offspring will have plenty to eat.

When striking out for new territory, one species of single-celled amoeba runs through a checklist: Secrete a chemical signal to attract other amoebas, mass together into a multicellular "slug," and prepare to slither off to new pastures. Oh, and don't forget to pack a lunch.

A new study finds that some strains of this social amoeba, called Dictyostelium discoideum, pack bacteria snacks with them before they travel. Once the amoebae reach their destination, they seed the area with the bacteria, ensuring any amoeba offspring will have plenty to eat.

Though the amoebae don't plow, hoe, or otherwise tend their bacterial crop, the behavior is a form of primitive farming, Rice University researchers reported Jan. 20 in the journal Nature.
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Sun

Will Betelgeuse Really Become a Second Sun in 2012?

Natalie Wolchover
Space.com
Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:57 UTC
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© Agence France-PresseA NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) image of the Sun. Many people may be surprised to learn that the Sun, rather than burn with faultless consistency, goes through moments of calm and tempest
Several online news sites, including the Huffington Post, have reported that the star Betelgeuse will undergo a supernova explosion next year - yes, that's 2012 - and shine as brightly in the sky as a second sun.

But according to scientists, it's all nonsense.

"Betelgeuse is losing mass, and it will turn into a supernova soon, but that 'soon' means on an astronomical time scale: It's as likely to happen a million years from now as it is tomorrow," University of Illinois astronomer Jim Kaler told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site of SPACE.com.

No one knows quite when Betelgeuse, which is about 10 to 20 times more massive than our sun, will explode. But when it does detonate, the star, which forms the constellation Orion's right shoulder, won't look like a second sun in our sky, Kaler said.

"The supernova would hit somewhere around the brightness of a crescent moon," said Kaler, who has focused his research on dying stars since the 1950s. "It would definitely be visible in full daylight, and it would cast shadows. It might scare the crap out of people to be honest, but it would be nowhere near as bright as the sun."
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Meteor

Mars Missing Magnetic Field, Was It Destroyed by a Massive Asteroid Impact?


The Daily Galaxy
Wed, 03 Nov 2010 15:50 UTC
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© Unknown
If you've seen The Core then you that the only thing between us and instant space-death is a magnetic field. You also know that's the only thing that's even heard of real science in the entire movie, but it's a pretty important one - and could explain why the otherwise eminently habitable Mars is such a barren wasteland. Scientists think the Martian magnetic field might have been hammered into submission by strikes from space. (The image above shows the the Syria, Sinai, and Solis Planum impact areas).

Planetary magnetic fields are created by massive molten metal currents within the planet's core. A flowing current creates a magnetic field, even when the current is massive volumes of charged liquid metal moving under the influence of temperature gradients (convection) - in fact, especially then. But magnetic analysis of Martian sites by Berkeley researchers show that the red planet's protective field was switched off half a billion years ago, and now some scientists say they know why.

All was pure speculation until data came back from the Mars Global Surveyor and other recent spacecraft. In 2009, planetary scientists Robert Lillis and Michael Manga, both of the University of California, Berkeley, linked age estimates of impact basins with magnetic field strength to show that the previously established date of heavy bombardment, about 3.9 billion years ago, corresponds to the death of Mars's dynamo.
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