Science & TechnologyS


Info

GRAIL and the Mystery of the Missing Moon

Moon Collision
© M. Jutzi and E. Asphaug, Nature.The "Big Splat." Four snapshots from a computer simulation of a collision between the Moon and a smaller companion show how the splattered companion moon forms a mountainous region on one side of the Moon.

As early as Sept. 8th, NASA's GRAIL mission will blast off to uncover some of the mysteries beneath the surface of the Moon. That cratered gray exterior hides some tantalizing things - even, perhaps, a long-lost companion.

If a paper published recently in the journal Nature* is right, two moons once graced our night skies. The proposition has not been proven, but has drawn widespread attention.

"It's an intriguing idea," says David Smith, GRAIL deputy principal investigator at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "And it would be a way to explain one of the great perplexities of the Earth-Moon system - the Moon's strangely asymmetrical nature. Its near and far sides are substantially different."

The Moon's near side, facing us, is dominated by vast smooth 'seas' of ancient hardened lava. In contrast, the far side is marked by mountainous highlands. Researchers have long struggled to account for the differences, and the "two moon" theory introduced by Martin Jutzi and Erik Asphaug of the University of California at Santa Cruz is the latest attempt.

Scientists agree that when a Mars-sized object crashed into our planet about 4 billion years ago, the resulting debris cloud coalesced to form the Moon. Jutzi and Asphaug posit that the debris cloud actually formed two moons. A second, smaller chunk of debris landed in just the right orbit to lead or follow the bigger Moon around Earth.

"Normally, such moons accrete into a single body shortly after formation," explains Smith. "But the new theory proposes that the second moon ended up at one of the Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system."

Info

Molecular Clues Hint at What Really Caused the Black Death

Black Death
© Live ScienceA depiction of the black death from a 15th century Bible.

The Black Death arrived in London in the fall of 1348, and although the worst passed in less than a year, the disease took a catastrophic toll. An emergency cemetery in East Smithfield received more than 200 bodies a day between the following February and April, in addition to bodies buried in other graveyards, according to a report from the time.

The disease that killed Londoners buried in East Smithfield and at least one of three Europeans within a few years time is commonly believed to be bubonic plague, a bacterial infection marked by painful, feverish, swollen lymph nodes, called buboes. Plague is still with us in many parts of the world, although now antibiotics can halt its course.

But did this disease really cause the Black Death? The story behind this near-apocalypse in 14th century Europe is not clear-cut, since what we know about modern plague in many ways does not match with what we know about the Black Death. And if plague isn't responsible for the Black Death, scientists wonder what could've caused the sweeping massacre and whether that killer is still lurking somewhere.

Now, a new study using bone and teeth taken from East Smithfield adds to mounting evidence exhumed from Black Death graves and tantalizes skeptics with hints at the true nature of the disease that wiped out more than a third of Europeans 650 years ago.

This team of researchers approached the topic with open minds when they began looking for genetic evidence of the killer.

"Essentially by looking at the literature on the Black Death there were several candidates for what could have been the cause," said Sharon DeWitte, one of the researchers who is now an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of South Carolina.

Their first suspect: Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes modern plague, including bubonic plague.

Comment: For more information about the Black Death's epidemiology and its possible causative agents see Return of the Black Death: The World's Greatest Serial Killer by Susan Scott & Christopher Duncan and New Light on the Black Death: The Viral and Cosmic Connection .


Fish

Dolphins Talk Like Humans

Dolphin
© Getty ImagesDolphins don't whistle, but communicate using a method that's similar to the way humans talk.

Dolphins do not whistle, but instead "talk" to each other using a process very similar to the way that humans communicate, according to a new study.

While many dolphin calls sound like whistles, the study found the sounds are produced by tissue vibrations analogous to the operation of vocal folds by humans and many other land-based animals.

Communicating similar to the way that humans do solves what would otherwise be a major dolphin problem.

"When we or animals are whistling, the tune is defined by the resonance frequency of some air cavity," said Peter Madsen, lead author of the research appearing in Royal Society Biology Letters. "The problem is that when dolphins dive, their air cavities are compressed due to the increasing ambient pressure, which means that they would produce a higher and higher pitch the deeper they dive if they actually whistle."

Madsen, a researcher in the Department of Biological Sciences at Aarhus University, and his team studied how dolphins communicate by digitizing and reanalyzing recordings made in 1977 of a 12-year-old male bottlenose dolphin.

Info

Blind Cave Fish Can Tell Time

Cave Fish
© Saulo BambiSomalian cave fish (Phreatichthys andruzzii) evolved in the perpetual darkness of caves more than a million years ago. Even so, they have a working, albeit distorted, biological clock.

A blind cave fish that has spent millions of years underground isolated from evidence of day and night still has a working biological clock, albeit an unusually distorted one, scientists find.

This research could yield new clues on how such clocks might work in animals in general, researchers added.

Internal clocks known as circadian rhythms help animals, plants and other life to adapt their daily activities to the cycle of day and night. These clocks do not always follow a precise 24-hour schedule, so to keep synchronized with the natural world, they get reset on a daily basis by signals such as daylight.

One question circadian clocks bring to mind is whether and how those creatures that live in perpetual darkness still keep time. For instance, about 50 fish species worldwide have evolved to live without sunlight in caves, many times losing their eyes.

"Cave fish give us a unique opportunity to understand how profoundly sunlight has influenced our evolution," said researcher Cristiano Bertolucci, a chronobiologist at the University of Ferrara in Italy.

Info

Whale "Billboard" --'Pop Culture' of the Planet's Largest Species

Sperm Whale
© The Daily Galaxy
Scientists are starting to consider the notion that whales might have a pretty cool culture. It looks as though Herman Melville picked the right hero for his epic novel.

"Whales are pretty hard to study, but evidence is coming up from quite a number of species that in a whole range of ways, they're learning things from each other and they're passing it on to other whales, and that's culture," says Hal Whitehead, biology professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Whitehead says whales don't have opposable thumbs, so they can't craft material objects to pass on through the generations: "Whale cultures are in their minds and not in the things that they make."

"Whale culture has, like human culture, a range of types and styles," says Whitehead. "At one end, there are the fast moving what might be called 'pop' cultures, such as when male Humpback whales sing songs to attract females or ward off other males. "These songs evolve, so that at the beginning of the breeding season they're all singing one song and then it's changed a bit by the end," says Whitehead. "And after a couple of years they're singing a totally different song."

But other whale languages are more constant and enduring. The dialects of killer whales, which travel in large extended-family groups called pods, "seem to change much more slowly and to be linked to particular social structures," says Whitehead. "A particular pod will have its own dialect, and that dialect will be similar to pods which are the members of the same clan, and clans will have dialects which are different from one another - just as humans from different parts of the same country may sound a bit different, but humans from different countries may be totally unintelligible to each other," says Whitehead. And these dialects will be stable. "In sperm whales which we study, we can record a group of sperm whales now, we can record them ten years from now, and we won't notice any difference in the sounds they're making."

Radar

UK Company Develops Camouflage Cloak for Military Vehicles

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© bbc.co.ukA heat scope detects a car, even though it's actually a tank using the heat masking technology
BAE Systems hopes to eventually make this technology work with other wavelengths to achieve true invisibility

Militaries from around the world are constantly looking to adopt new technologies that can aid in the protection of soldiers while still carrying out specific duties. For instance, the U.S. military mentioned earlier this year that it wants to test new gadgets every six months in order to put new "capabilities" into the hands of soldiers. Now, there's a new defense technology that could give tanks nighttime invisibility.

The new creation, known as Adaptiv technology, is a camouflage cloak that masks the vehicle's infrared signature by imitating the temperature of its surroundings.

BAE Systems, a British multinational defense, security and aerospace company in London, United Kingdom, is the creator of the camouflage cloak. Using hexagonal panels, or pixels, which are made of a material that can change temperature rapidly, BAE Systems was able to make a cloak that not only allows tanks to mimic its surrounding temperatures, but also makes the tanks look like other objects.

Beaker

Pair Claim They Can Make Ammonia to Fuel Cars for Just 20 Cents Per Liter

Amonia engine
© WikipediaProduction of ammonia 1946-2007.
John Fleming of SilverEagles Energy and Tim Maxwell from Texas Tech University, say they have developed a way to make ammonia that is cheap enough so that it could be used as fuel for cars. If their claims turn out to be true, many consumers might consider switching over because ammonia, when burned in an engine, emits nothing but nitrogen and water vapor out the tailpipe. And if that's not enough incentive, they claim they can make the ammonia for just 20 cents a liter (approximately 75 cents a gallon).

The secret to their low cost estimates actually lie in their newly developed method for making hydrogen, which they use to make their ammonia. They say that by using a new kind of transformer that Fleming built, they can reduce the number of cells necessary for electrolysis to such a degree that they can produce hydrogen at almost half the cost of traditional electrolysis methods.

To make the ammonia, the hydrogen produced is pumped into a compression chamber where a piston squeezes it, causing it to heat up; in this case to 400C°. The result is then allowed to escape into another compartment where a reaction is set off by an iron oxide catalyst. This makes the hydrogen grow even hotter to the point where it begins creating ammonia. The ammonia and leftover hydrogen is then allowed to cool down and decompress in yet a third compartment, and in so doing causes another piston to move back and forth creating energy that is fed back into the system to help lower electric consumption. Then, the ammonia is chilled to -75C° and pumped into a tank for use.

Cars already on the road can use ammonia as an additive without modification (up to 10%) and flex cars could be, according to Fleming, easily modified to use ammonia in conjunction with ethanol, allowing for a mixture of 85% ammonia.

Light Sabers

Antibiotic Resistance Existed Before Man Created the First Drug?

Image
© Reuters / Jo Yong hakResistance to antibiotics is something that has frustrated scientists for decades; it turns out the problem is an ancient phenomenon.
New findings from an analysis of 30,000-year-old bacteria show that antibiotic resistance is nothing new, rather a widespread natural phenomenon that somehow preceded the breakthroughs of modern medicine.

The DNA of the old bacteria was recovered from permafrost soil in Canada's Yukon Territory.

The results are published in a recent issue of Nature.

Experts now say the new finding highlights the need to sparingly use antibiotics, seeing that the genes for its resistance are widespread and can easily be promoted by antibiotics.

"Antibiotic resistance is seen as a current problem and the fact that antibiotics are becoming less effective because of resistance spreading in hospitals is a known fact," said Gerry Wright, scientific director of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research and Hendrik Poinar. "The big question is where does all of this resistance come from?"

War Whore

Sweden: Army rolls out invisible infrared tank

Pixellated thermal armour cloak conceals or disguises

Engineers in Sweden have announced the development of a prototype tank which is covered in "pixels" that enable it to disappear from thermal images - or to disguise itself as something else.

The "Adaptiv" system, funded by the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV), covers the test vehicle in hexagonal panels whose temperature can be quickly adjusted. The vehicle's own thermal cameras scan the background against which the tank is seen from each aspect, and the system can then adjust the pixels to match, making it very hard to see using thermal imaging systems. Alternatively, the pixels can be manipulated to present the appearance of something other than a tank - for instance a car or truck.

invtank
© The RegisterHow future visible-light versions of the stealth tank might look in action.

Magnify

Electric Motor Made from a Single Molecule

butyl methyl sulphide molecule
The butyl methyl sulphide molecule whips round an axis defined by its single sulphur atom (blue)
Researchers have created the smallest electric motor ever devised.

The motor, made from a single molecule just a billionth of a metre across, is reported in Nature Nanotechnology.

The minuscule motor could have applications in both nanotechnology and in medicine, where tiny amounts of work can be put to efficient use.

Tiny rotors based on single molecules have been shown before, but this is the first that can be individually driven by an electric current.