Science & TechnologyS


Satellite

U.S. To Create Outer Space Code of Conduct with Other Nations

Tiffany Kaiser
DailyTech
Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:57 UTC
Image
© historyguy.comSecretary of State Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton assures that the code of conduct will not keep the military busy or compromise national security

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced Tuesday that the United States will begin working on an international code of conduct for outer space with other nations around the world.

An international code of conduct would put concrete space-related rules in place for all participating nations. According to Clinton, the main threats that the rules would address are space junk and "irresponsible actors."

There are currently more than 500,000 pieces of space junk debris surrounding Earth, according to NASA, and about 22,000 of these pieces are as large as a softball. Only about 1,100 are active satellites. Space junk is the collection of objects created by humans that are left in orbit, but are no longer useful.

Clinton sees this space junk as potentially harmful, and for good reason. Just last month, a Siberian man escaped death as a Russian satellite fragment crashed right through his roof. The fragment was about the size of a 5 kg titanium ball.

Comment: Is this a small media campaign to begin bastardizing China? It's very subtle, but it seems to be geared toward slowly making China who (like Russia) is an ally of Iran, to appear to be a loose cannon. What is it about the European version of the "Space Code of Conduct" that has caused the U.S. to have shunned it?

Though vaguely, it can be seen that the War on Terror and security by way of fearmongering, is high on the agenda for steering the minds of the masses.

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UFO 2

NASA Debunks Mysterious Triangular 'UFO'


SPACE.com
Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:56 UTC
Image
© YouTube | ridleyjaThe triangular "UFO" as seen in footage captured by a telescopic camera on the STEREO-B spacecraft.

Once again, alien conspiracy theorists have attempted to use publicly available NASA images to prove that the space agency must be engaging in an elaborate UFO cover-up. And, once again, they've been foiled by the laws of physics.

This time, they called attention to peculiar new footage captured by a telescope onboard NASA's STEREO-B spacecraft - one of a pair of probes parked on either side of the sun which, together, provide a 360-degree view of the inner solar system. The footage shows Venus, Earth and, on the opposite side of the field-of-view, a mysterious triangular object headed our way.

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Info

Life-Long Intelligence in The Genes

Heidi Ledford
Nature
Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:36 UTC
Intelligence
© Peter Dazeley/GettyGenetics has a direct influence on how well intelligence lasts into old age, a study of Scottish people has found.

A Scottish intelligence study that began 80 years ago has borne new fruit. Researchers have tracked down the study's surviving participants - who joined the study when they were 11 years old - to estimate the role that our genes have in maintaining intelligence through to old age.

Researchers have long been interested in understanding how cognition changes with age, and why these changes are more rapid in some people than in others. But, in the past, studies of age-related intelligence changes were often performed when the subjects were already elderly.

Then, in the late 1990s, research psychologist Ian Deary of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues realized that Scotland had two data sets that would allow them to take such studies a step further. In 1932 and 1947, officials had conducted a sweeping study of intelligence among thousands of 11-year-old Scottish children. The data, Deary learned, had been kept confidential for decades.

He and his colleagues set about tracking down the original participants, many of whom did not remember taking the original tests. The team collected DNA samples and performed fresh intelligence tests in nearly 2,000 of the original participants, then aged 65 or older.

Previous analyses of the team's data had shown that childhood intelligence correlated well with intelligence in old age. "But it's not a perfect relationship," says Deary. "Some people move up the list and some move down."

In short, some people's intelligence 'ages' better than others. So Deary and his colleagues set out to discover why.
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Hourglass

Are Leap Seconds Becoming A Thing Of The Past?


redOrbit
Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:32 UTC
Leap Seconds
© Adrian Hancu

For at least ten years experts have been debating the use of leap seconds, tiny bits of time added to calendars and clocks in hopes of reconciling the difference between atomic time used by computer systems and time as defined by measuring the Earth's movement around the sun and its daily, but slightly slowing, rotation.

Governments have been split on the issue but are expected to make a decision this week at a UN telecom meeting, says the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) on Tuesday.

The United States, France and others are the primary countries pushing for the entire scientific community to abolish the leap second, while Britain is digging in its heels to maintain the current system along with China and Canada, writes Reuters' Stephanie Nebehay. Russia has not publicly voiced its opinion but has quietly aligned itself with Britain and China.

As computers became more accurate and faster, leap seconds became more necessary to prevent atomic clocks from speeding ahead of solar time. Added at irregular intervals beginning in 1972, these extra seconds effectively stretch atomic time by a heartbeat to make up for the irregular wobble in the Earth's rotation, reports AP's Frank Jordans.

Vincent Meens, who headed an ITU group recommending the removal of leap seconds, told reporters, "This will be an important decision because the problem of introducing the leap second will disappear and we will be able to have a more standard time than the one we have today."
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Info

Australia: High-Tech Bid to Save Ancient Top End Language

Jano Gibson
ABC, Australia,
Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:43 UTC
Language App
© ABC NewsThe application will be launched in May.
Researchers are developing a mobile phone application in an effort to help save an ancient Aboriginal language that is close to being lost forever.

The language of Iwaidja is thousands of years old but on Croker Island in the Top End only about 150 people still speak it.

Iwaidja is one of about 50 known Aboriginal languages of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory.

Bruce Birch from the Minjilang Endangered Languages Project has been working with locals to try to save it.

"It is one of Australia's hundred or so highly endangered languages," he said.

Using $100,000 of federal funding, a mobile phone application is being developed.
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Info

Saturn's Moon Titan May be More Earth-Like Than Thought

Charles Q. Choi
Space.com
Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:20 UTC
Titan
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteThis view shows a close up of toward the south polar region of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, and show a depression within the moon's orange and blue haze layers near the south pole. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft snapped the image on Sept. 11, 2011 and it was released on Dec. 22.

Saturn's moon Titan may be more similar to an Earth-like world than previously thought, possessing a layered atmosphere just like our planet, researchers said.

Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and is the only moon known to have a dense atmosphere. A better understanding of how its hazy, soupy atmosphere works could shed light on similar ones scientists might find on alien planets and moons. However, conflicting details about how Titan's atmosphere is structured have emerged over the years.

The lowest layer of any atmosphere, known as its boundary layer, is most influenced by a planet or moon's surface. It in turn most influences the surface with clouds and winds, as well as by sculpting dunes.

"This layer is very important for the climate and weather - we live in the terrestrial boundary layer," said study lead author Benjamin Charnay, a planetary scientist at France's National Center of Scientific Research.

Earth's boundary layer, which is between 1,650 feet and 1.8 miles (500 meters and 3 kilometers) thick, is controlled largely by solar heat warming the planet's surface. Since Titan is much further away from the sun, its boundary layer might behave quite differently, but much remains uncertain about it - Titan's atmosphere is thick and opaque, confusing what we know about its lower layers.
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Magnify

New Animal Virus Takes Northern Europe by Surprise

Kai Kupferschmidt
Sciencenow.org
Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:08 UTC
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© FotosearchHost of questions. A new virus that causes stillbirths in sheep and other livestock is puzzling scientists.
Scientists in northern Europe are scrambling to learn more about a new virus that causes fetal malformations and stillbirths in cattle, sheep, and goats. For now, they don't have a clue about the virus's origins or why it's suddenly causing an outbreak; in order to speed up the process, they want to share the virus and protocols for detecting it with anyone interested in studying the disease or developing diagnostic tools and vaccines.

The virus, provisionally named "Schmallenberg virus" after the German town from which the first positive samples came, was detected in November in dairy cows that had shown signs of infection with fever and a drastic reduction in milk production. Now it has also been detected in sheep and goats, and it has shown up at dozens of farms in neighboring Netherlands and in Belgium as well. According to the European Commission's Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health, cases have been detected on 20 farms in Germany, 52 in the Netherlands, and 14 in Belgium. Many more suspected cases are being investigated. "A lot of lambs are stillborn or have serious malformations," Wim van der Poel of the Dutch Central Veterinary Institute in Lelystad says. "This is a serious threat to animal health in Europe."
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Frog

World's Tiniest Frogs Found in Papua New Guinea


Breitbart
Wed, 11 Jan 2012 04:15 UTC
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© Agence France-Presse/Christopher Austin/Louisiana State University World's smallest vertebrate
With voices hardly louder than an insect's buzz, the tiniest frogs ever discovered are smaller than a coin and hop about the rainforest of the tropical island of Papua New Guinea, US scientists said Wednesday.

Not only are these little peepers with the big names -- Paedophryne amauensis and Paedophryne swiftorum -- the smallest frogs known to man, they are also believed to be the smallest vertebrates on Earth, said the report in the science journal PLoS ONE.

Until now the smallest vertebrate was believed to be a transparent Indonesian fish known as Paedocypris progenetica that averaged about eight millimeters (one-third inch).

The largest vertebrate is the blue whale, measuring about 25.8 meters (yards).

The little land frog Paedophryne amauensis comes in at a whopping 7.7 millimeters, or less than one-third of an inch. The other newly discovered kind, Paedophryne swiftorum, measures a bit over eight millimeters.
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Laptop

Addicted! Scientists Show How Internet Dependency Alters the Human Brain (They really mean "games")

Jeremy Laurance
The Independent, UK
Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© Getty Images
Internet addiction has for the first time been linked with changes in the brain similar to those seen in people addicted to alcohol, cocaine and cannabis. In a groundbreaking study, researchers used MRI scanners to reveal abnormalities in the brains of adolescents who spent many hours on the internet, to the detriment of their social and personal lives. The finding could throw light on other behavioural problems and lead to the development of new approaches to treatment, researchers said.

An estimated 5 to 10 per cent of internet users are thought to be addicted - meaning they are unable to control their use. The majority are games players who become so absorbed in the activity they go without food or drink for long periods and their education, work and relationships suffer.

Henrietta Bowden Jones, consultant psychiatrist at Imperial College, London, who runs Britain's only NHS clinic for internet addicts and problem gamblers, said: "The majority of people we see with serious internet addiction are gamers - people who spend long hours in roles in various games that cause them to disregard their obligations. I have seen people who stopped attending university lectures, failed their degrees or their marriages broke down because they were unable to emotionally connect with anything outside the game."


Comment: Notice how the headline says "Internet Dependency" when the actual problem is dependency on games which can also be played without being on the internet.

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Magnify

Can A Scientist Define "Life"?

Carl Zimmer
Txchnologist
Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:39 UTC
A strand of RNA.
© Universitat Pompeu FabraA strand of RNA.
In November 2011, NASA launched its biggest, most ambitious mission to Mars. The $2.5 billion Mars Science Lab spacecraft will arrive in orbit around the Red Planet this August, releasing a lander that will use rockets to control a slow descent into the atmosphere. Equipped with a "sky crane," the lander will gently lower the one-ton Curosity rover on the surface of Mars. Curiosity, which weighs five times more than any previous Martian rover, will perform an unprecedented battery of tests for three months as it scoops up soil from the floor of the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater. Its mission, NASA says, will be to "assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an environment able to support microbial life."

For all the spectacular engineering that's gone into Curiosity, however, its goal is actually quite modest. When NASA says it wants to find out if Mars was ever suitable for life, they use a very circumscribed version of the word. They are looking for signs of liquid water, which all living things on Earth need. They are looking for organic carbon, which life on Earth produces and, in some cases, can feed on to survive. In other words, they're looking on Mars for the sorts of conditions that support life on Earth.

But there's no good reason to assume that all life has to be like the life we're familiar with. In 2007, a board of scientists appointed by the National Academies of Science decided they couldn't rule out the possibility that life might be able to exist without water or carbon. If such weird life on Mars exists, Curiosity will probably miss it.
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