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Pinocchio's Real Roots Mapped

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News
Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:30 UTC
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."
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Info

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

Jennifer Welsh
Live Science
Thu, 07 Jul 2011 16:39 UTC
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."
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Saturn

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

Charlie Jane Anders
io9
Thu, 07 Jul 2011 05:30 UTC
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.
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Where Did Early Cosmic Dust Come From? New Research Says Supernovae

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:40 UTC
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.
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Saturn

Astronomers Observe Colossal Saturn Storm


CBS Sacramento
Wed, 06 Jul 2011 16:23 UTC
saturn,storm
© NASA/JPLThe huge storm churning through the atmosphere in Saturn’s northern hemisphere overtakes itself as it encircles the planet in this true-color view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

Los Angeles - It began as a bright white dot in Saturn's northern hemisphere. Within days, the dot grew larger and stormier.

Soon the tempest enveloped the ringed planet, triggering lightning flashes thousands of times more intense than on Earth.

The international Cassini spacecraft and ground telescopes have been tracking the turbulence since last December, visible from Earth as a type of storm known as a "Great White Spot."

"It's still going like crazy," said Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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Question

Polar Bears Have Irish Lineage

Emily Sohn
Discovery News
Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:01 UTC
Some 50,000 years ago, modern polar bears split from a population of Irish brown bears.

Polar Bear
© Daniel J. Cox / NaturalExposures.comA genetic study found Irish roots for the polar bear and revealed the bear interbred with other bear species multiple times.
Today, polar bears live only on the northernmost stretches of ice and snow, but their roots may lie farther south -- in an area that is now Ireland.

Sometime within the last 50,000 years, suggests a new genetic study, modern polar bears split from a population of Irish brown bears. The finding both clarifies and complicates how well scientists understand polar bear evolution.

Scientists already knew, for example, that the giant white bears first evolved at least 110,000 years ago, with origins most likely in coastal Siberia. Based on the new results, though, it looks like polar bears then proceeded to interbreed with brown bears multiple times after they first diverged -- usually during periods when climate cooling or warming allowed the ranges of the two species to overlap.

Taking in new genes during these periods may have helped polar bears survive changing environmental conditions. Now, as climate warming pushes polar bears and brown bears closer together again, the study may offer some hope for the threatened polar bear's future.

"The results suggest that what is likely to happen in the future is exactly what has been observed: Their ranges are beginning to overlap, and they are hybridizing" said lead author Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at The Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "As long as polar bear habitat remains, there is a chance that the polar bear will survive."
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Einstein

Dwarf Galaxies Orbiting The Milky Way Overturn Newton


The Daily Galaxy
Thu, 07 Jul 2011 14:13 UTC
Galaxy
© The Daily Galaxy

It turns out that we don't know everything about the universe. Shocking, we know, but you'd be surprised how often science writers, politicians, or intelligent design idiots confuse "non-omniscience" with "everything is WRONG!" Now some are saying that Newton screwed up, but at least their evidence is awesome: dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way! The dwarf galaxies resemble systems cannibalized by the Milky Way billions of years ago to build up its stellar halo and thick disk, characterized as "crumbs from the galactic feast."

First off, Newton was never "wrong" - he was "right as far as it was humanly possible to be in the seventeenth century." You have to remember that he defined all the motion he ever saw with a pencil, and when he discovered the math didn't exist he just spent a chunk of his life inventing it - meanwhile, you use a supercomputer system to watch cats falling out of trees.

There wasn't a lot of near-light-speed motion at the time, nor any neutrinos, and it's important to remember that the people who build bridges don't go with general relativity or quantum mechanics - it's all the three laws of force, baby. You only find you need further theories when you look outside, and Professor Pavel Kroupa of the University of Bonn and colleagues have looked as outside as you can reasonably get: analyzing the motions of dwarf galaxies, thousands of starts orbiting the entire Milky Way. There they've found some fascinating contradictions.
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Info

Best of the Web: The Ultimate Time Travelers --Microbes Survive Millions of Years Traveling in Space


The Daily Galaxy
Thu, 07 Jul 2011 14:05 UTC
Comet
© The Daily Galaxy

In a unique experiment on a galactic scale, millions of bacterial spores have been purposely exposed to space, to see how solar radiation affects them and the results supported the idea that not only could life have arrived on Earth on meteorites, but that considerable material has flowed between planets.

Closer to home, scientists have analyzed aerial dust samples collected by Charles Darwin and confirmed that microbes can travel across continents without the need for planes or trains - rather bacteria and fungi hitch-hike by attaching to dust particles. Their results clearly show that diverse microbes, including ascomycetes, and eubacteria can live for centuries and survive intercontinental travel.

In a paper published in Environmental Microbiology, Dr. Anna Gorbushina (Carl-von-Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany), Professor William Broughton (University of Geneva, Switzerland) and their colleagues analyzed dust samples collected by Charles Darwin and others almost 200 years ago.

Recent space-centric studies have shown that some rock-inhabiting organisms, known as "endoliths," might be able to survive a trip through space and a plunge through a planet's atmosphere to the surface. However, nobody knew whether these organisms could survive the initial trip into space.

An international team of researchers, led by Gerda Horneck of the Institute of Aerospace Medicine in Cologne, Germany, selected a number of hardy microbes from Earth and tested their ability to hitchhike aboard rocks similar to Martian meteorites.
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Fish

Gray Whales Likely Survived the Ice Ages by Changing Their Diets


ScienceDaily
Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:57 UTC
Image
© iStockphoto/Marshall BruceA grey whale mother and calf off the coast of Baja California. If ancient gray whale populations migrated and fed the same as today's whales, what happened during the Ice Ages, when their major feeding grounds disappeared?
If ancient gray whale populations migrated and fed the same as today's whales, what happened during the Ice Ages, when their major feeding grounds disappeared? UC Berkeley and Smithsonian paleontologists argue that gray whales utilized a range of food sources in the past, including herring and krill, in addition to the benthic organisms they consume today. As a result, pre-whaling populations were two to four times greater than today's population of around 22,000.

Gray whales survived many cycles of global cooling and warming over the past few million years, likely by exploiting a more varied diet than they do today, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, and Smithsonian Institution paleontologists.

The researchers, who analyzed California gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) responses to climate change over the past 120,000 years, also found evidence to support the idea that the population of gray whales along the Pacific Coast before the arrival of humans was two to four times today's population, which stands at about 22,000. The whale is considered a conservation success story because protections instituted as early as the 1930s have allowed populations to rebound from fewer than 1,000 individuals in the early 20th century, after less than 75 years of systematic whaling.
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Telescope

ESA unveils billion pixel camera that will map the Milky Way

Richard Chirgwin
The Register
Thu, 07 Jul 2011 04:00 UTC
That's not a camera: this is the camera

The European Space Agency has announced the completion of the camera that's to be used in its Gaia mission: a billion-pixel mosaic comprising 106 individual CCDs in a 0.5x1 meter array.

Assembled in May and June at Astrium's facility in Toulouse, the camera is designed to map around a billion stars when Gaia's five-year mission begins in 2013. The CCDs were developed by UK company e2v Technologies, with each measuring 4.7x6cm.
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