Science & TechnologyS


Binoculars

Underground River "Rio Hamza" Discovered 4km Beneath the Amazon

Alok Jha
The Guardian, UK
Fri, 26 Aug 2011 05:44 UTC
Image
© Frans Lanting/CorbisAn aerial view of the Amazon river.
Scientists estimate the subterranean river may be 6,000km long and hundreds of times wider than the Amazon

Brazilian scientists have found a new river in the Amazon basin - around 4km underneath the Amazon river. The Rio Hamza, named after the head of the team of researchers who found the groundwater flow, appears to be as long as the Amazon river, but hundreds of times wider.

The rivers of the Amazon basin constitute one of the largest drainage systems on the Earth, with a catchment area of more than 7 million square kilometres.

Both the Amazon and Hamza flow from west to east and are around the same length, at 6,000km. But whereas the Amazon ranges from 1km to 100km in width, the Hamza ranges from 200km to 400km.

The underground river starts in the Acre region under the Andes and flows through the Solimões, Amazonas and Marajó basins before opening out directly into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
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Arrow Down

Russian Spacecraft Falls from the Sky. Is the International Space Station in Trouble?

Fred Weir
The Christian Science Monitor
Thu, 25 Aug 2011 19:30 UTC
Image
© Rossiya 24 TV Channel/AP PhotoA Soyuz rocket booster carrying the Progress supply ship is launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Wednesday
The second embarrassing loss of a Russian space vehicle in a week spells trouble for Russia's space program and its ability to maintain the International Space Station.

An unmanned Russian space freighter, which was launched on a resupply mission to the International Space Station, careened out of control and blew up in a "thunderous fireball" over Siberia Wednesday.

The blast triggering a state of emergency over a wide region and calls into doubt Russia's ability to handle its space obligations in the post-space shuttle era.

"The explosion was so strong that for 100 kilometers glass almost flew out of the windows," Alexander Borisov, an official in the remote and mountainous Altai Republic, on the Mongolian border, where most of the debris from the destroyed Progress spaceship rained down, was quoted by RIA-Novosti as saying.

Russian media reported Thursday that none of the wreckage fell on populated areas, and 40 lumberjacks who'd been working in the affected zone were all safe and accounted for.
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Telescope

Astronomers Discover Planet Made of Diamond

Ben Hirschler
Reuters
Thu, 25 Aug 2011 13:26 UTC
Image
© ReutersAn exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard in an undated image courtesy of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard.

The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.

"The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon -- i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun," said Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.

Lying 4,000 light years away, or around an eighth of the way toward the center of the Milky Way from the Earth, the planet is probably the remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers to the so-called pulsar star it orbits.

Pulsars are tiny, dead neutron stars that are only around 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in diameter and spin hundreds of times a second, emitting beams of radiation.
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Info

Possible Type-Ia Supernova in M101 Discovered

Tammy Plotner
Universe Today
Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:25 UTC
Messier 101 Supernova
© Adam Block/NOAO/AURA/NSFMessier 101
Thankfully it's a mostly Moon-free set of observing nights ahead, because there a possible Type-Ia Supernova in M101! If you're scrambling your brains to remember where it's at - think northern circumpolar and read on...

According to AAVSO Special Notice #250 P. Nugent et al. reported in Astronomical Telegram #3581 that a possible Type-Ia supernova has been discovered by the Palomar Transient Factory shortly after eruption in the galaxy M101 and has been designated "PTF11kly". The object is currently at a magnitude of 17.2, but may well rise by several magnitudes. The object is well placed within M101 for good photometry, and observations of this potential bright SNIa are strongly encouraged.

There are currently no comparison stars available in VSP for this field; please indicate clearly the comparison stars that you use for photometry when reporting observations to AAVSO. Please retain your images and/or photometry for recalibration when comparison star magnitudes are available.
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Info

Amazon Expedition Discovers New Monkey

Wynne Parry
Live Science
Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:01 UTC
Titi Monkey
© Julio DalponteThe researchers discovered what appears to be a new species of Callicebus, or titi, monkey, with unique features on its head and tail.

A possible new species of monkey has been discovered during an expedition in an unexplored part of the Amazon in mid-western Brazil.

A specimen, which scientists know is a type of Callicebus, or titi, monkey has been turned over to experts at the Emílio Goeldi Museum in the Brazilian state of Para, where it will be studied and formally described.

"This primate has features on its head and tail that have never been observed before in other titi monkey species found in the same area," said Julio Dalpone, the biologist who discovered the monkey during the World Wide Fund for Nature-backed expedition.

The expedition found the monkey between the Guariba River and the Roosevelt River in the northwestern part of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.

The 20-day expedition undertaken in December of 2010 explored four protected areas of the Guariba-Roosevelt Extractive Reserve, the Tucumã State Park and the Roosevelt River and Madeirinha River. It was intended to gather information to improve the management of these areas.
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Info

Sex with Neanderthals Made Us Stronger

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Thu, 25 Aug 2011 13:00 UTC
Neanderthal
© CorbisA replica of an old Neanderthal man at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany. New research suggest interbreeding with Neanderthals helped boost our species' immunity.

Mating with Neanderthals and another group of extinct hominids, Denisovans, strengthened the human immune system and left behind evidence in the DNA of people today, according new research.

The findings add to the growing body of evidence that modern humans who left Africa around 65,000 years ago mated with Neanderthals and Denisovans -- two archaic species that lived in Europe and Asia.

The study, which appears in this week's Science, is among the first to show how the interbreeding shaped modern human genes and the attributes they confer to us.

Peter Parham, a professor of cell biology, microbiology and immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and his team focused their analysis on "HLA" genes, which are fast-evolving vital components of the human immune system.

"The modern human populations who left Africa to colonize other continents were likely to have been small groups who started off with limited HLA diversity and suffered further reduction of HLA diversity due to disease," Parham told Discovery News. "Interbreeding with archaic humans introduced additional HLA variants into the modern human population that increased their genetic viability and capacity to resist infection."
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Beaker

Boffins Build Powerful Yet "Table-Top Size" Atom-Smasher

Brid-Aine Parnell
The Register
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 01:28 UTC
Suitcase plasma cannon collider surfs on friggin LASERS

Forget about mounting your lasers on the nearest shark, what you really want is a laser plasma accelerator you can put on your kitchen table.

Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have managed to create powerful electron beams from much, much, much smaller accelerators than before, which could be used as compact high-energy colliders for fundamental physics - doing the sort of research the Large Hadron Collider is doing right now.

The wee accelerators could also be used as "sources of intensely bright beams of light" for investigating new materials, biological structures and green chemistry. Or, presumably, for table-top disco lighting.
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Info

British Men May Have a Hunter-Gatherer Past

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 18:15 UTC
British Guard
© skoggy, stock.xchngA member of the Queen's Guard outside of Buckingham Palace in London.
British men may trace their lineage back to hunter-gatherers, not farmers as had previously been suspected.

A new genetic lineage study finds that, contrary to previous research, British men do not descend from immigrant farmers who migrated west from the Near East around 10,000 years ago. Instead, the new study finds that a common Y-chromosome gene in today's British men traces back to hunter-gatherers who settled in Europe long before farming got popular.

In a study first published online in August 2010 in the European Journal of Human Genetics, researchers from the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation in Utah reported that a certain genetic mutation on the Y chromosome (male sex chromosome) was most common in the southeast of Europe and much less prevalent on the British Isles and other northwestern regions. This southeast-northwest pattern matched the spread of the Linearbandkeramik, or Linear Pottery, culture, a Neolithic culture known for their pottery kitchen dishes.
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Info

'Jurassic Mother' Found in China

Brian Switek
Science Now
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:02 UTC
Juramaia
© Mark A. Klingler/Carnegie Museum of Natural HistoryEarly cousin. The restored skeleton and body of the Jurassic mammal Juramaia.

Way back in the Late Jurassic, 160 million years ago, your closest relative looked like a shrew. That's not an insult but an evolutionary truth that stems from a new fossil discovery that pushes back the earliest appearance of the peculiar group of mammals to which we, as well as many other mammal species, belong. During the heyday of the Jurassic dinosaurs, our own ancestors were just getting their start in the dark corners of the Mesozoic world.

Living mammals are split into three subgroups: the egg-laying monotremes; the pouched marsupials; and, the most diverse of all, placental mammals, which includes everything from humans to bats to whales. Each group diverged at different times, and determining when marsupials and placentals split from each other has been problematic. Fossil discoveries point to the Cretaceous, about 125 million years ago, whereas estimates made on genetic differences among living mammals suggest that the split happened even earlier.

Now the discovery of a partial skeleton of a small, shrewlike mammal, described online today in Nature, pushes back the date of the divergence by 30 million years, to 160 million years ago. Found in the famous fossil beds of Liaoning, China, the newly discovered little mammal has been named Juramaia sinensis, or "Jurassic mother from China."
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Question

Mystery Ingredient Influences Cloud Formation

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:00 UTC
Clouds
© hirekatsu, stock.xchngClouds create colorful stripes across the sky at sunset.

The bad news about clouds: We know even less about them than we thought we did.

The good news: We might be on our way to figuring them out.

A new cloud chamber that contains man-made air and uses a particle beam to mimic cosmic rays has revealed that cloud formation in the lower atmosphere involves at least one ingredient as yet unknown to science. However, the experiment also has uncovered some chemical fingerprints that may help researchers track down the mystery vapor.

The results are important because clouds and their precursors, aerosols, are the largest sources of uncertainty in climate change models. Researchers know that greenhouse gas emissions warm the Earth and that aerosols and clouds could moderate some of that effect by reflecting sunlight back into space. But these particles are so elusive and poorly understood that it's difficult to account for them in computer models of the climate. And now researchers are learning about how little they knew about cloud formation in the first place, said study researcher Jasper Kirkby, a particle physicist at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland.

"We know even less about aerosols than we thought we did," Kirkby told LiveScience. "So we had problems before and now we've got bigger problems."
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