Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Study: Ancient megavolcanoes killed half the world's species


Raw Story
Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:51 UTC
Image
© AFP Photo
New rock dating techniques have helped narrow the timeframe of a chain of massive volcanic eruptions that wiped out half the world's species 200 million years ago, a study said Thursday.

The result is the most precise date yet - 201,564,000 years ago - for the event known as the End-Triassic Extinction, or the fourth mass extinction, said the study in the journal Science.

The eruptions "had to be a hell of an event," said co-author Dennis Kent, a paleomagnetism expert at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

They may offer a historic parallel to the human-caused climate change happening today, by showing how sharp increases in carbon dioxide can outpace vulnerable species' ability to adapt, researchers said.

The new analysis winnows the estimated date from its previous range of up to three million years to 20,000 years at most, a blink of an eye in geological terms.
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Eggs Fried

Monster double eggs laid by 'miracle chicken' in China


Guardian
Sun, 17 Mar 2013 13:02 UTC
A Chinese chicken lays an egg that weighs half a pound, has two yolks inside and contains another fully-formed egg. The hen has been laying these extraordinary items for three weeks, according to its owner. She also says she thought the bird was dying as it struggled to lay the first mammoth egg.
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Comet

Large asteroid colliding with Earth 'probable this century'


Guardian
Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:57 UTC
Physicist and former Nasa astronaut, Dr. Ed Lu, discusses the possible threat that near-Earth asteroids pose to our planet. Lu claims there is a 30% chance of a five mega tonne impact happening this century. He says technologies exist that may prevent impacts to Earth, but without years of advance notice there would be 'no option'.
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Comet 2

Dinosaur-killing space rock 'was a comet'

Paul Rincon
BBC
Fri, 22 Mar 2013 10:03 UTC
Image
The space rock that hit Earth 65 million years ago and is widely implicated in the end of the dinosaurs was likely a speeding comet. That is the conclusion of research which suggests the 180km-wide Chicxulub crater in Mexico was carved out by a smaller object than previously thought. Many scientists consider a large and relatively slow moving asteroid to have been the likely culprit.


Comment: The latest research indicates that it's not the multi-million-year larger space rocks that we need to be concerned about, but the swarms of smaller objects that wreak havoc on human civilizations far more often than people realise... Celestial Intentions: Comets and the Horns of Moses


Details were outlined at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. But other researchers were more cautious about the results. "The overall aim of our project is to better characterise the impactor that produced the crater in the Yucatan peninsula [in Mexico]," Jason Moore, from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, told BBC News.

The space rock gave rise to a global layer of sediments enriched in the chemical element iridium, in concentrations much higher than naturally occurs; it must have come from outer space.
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Info

Rare blood mystery solved: Why Vel-negative type rejects transfusions

Ashik Siddique
Medical Daily
Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:11 UTC
Blood Transfusion
© Medical Daily
In a breakthrough for personalized medicine, researchers have identified the genetic and molecular basis of the rare Vel-negative blood type, which carries a risk of severe blood transfusion rejection.

Since the 1950's, scientists have been baffled by the elusive blood type. Vel-negative blood contains an antibody that makes blood transfusions dangerous, but the blood type is difficult to identify and supply. The antibody can cause violent rejection of transfused blood, and successive blood transfusions can lead to kidney failure or death for Vel-negative patients.

Doctors have unsuccessfully hunted for the cause of this blood type for decades, but a new study may have finally solved the mystery of how to detect it.

Researchers led by Bryan Ballif of the University of Vermont (UVM) and the Lionel Arnaud of the French National Institute of Blood Transfusion have discovered a small protein molecule called SMIM1 that is responsible for the debilitating effects of the Vel-negative blood type, and identified two rapid DNA tests for identifying Vel-negative blood in patients.

Their results were published online in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine on March 18.
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Cell Phone

Scientists claim to have built hologram-projecting cell phone


Raw Story
Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:28 UTC
Image
© AFP Photo
Fancy watching a movie on your mobile phone, where figures leap out from the screen in 3D, rather as Princess Leia did in that scene from "Star Wars"?

That's the claim made by US researchers, who on Wednesday reported they had made a display which gives a three-dimensional image that can be viewed without special glasses and is intended for cellphones, tablets and watches.

Unlike the holographic projection used in George Lucas' movie fantasy, their small prototype display is flat and backlit.

It uses a technology called diffractive optics to give 3D images that can be viewed from multiple angles, even if the device is tilted.

"Unlike a lot of technology out there that only does so-called horizontal parallax, which means that you only see 3D when you move your head left and right, we actually are talking about a technology that gives 3D for full parallax," said David Fattal, who led a team at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California.

"For example, if you were to display a 3D image of Planet Earth with the North Pole facing out from the screen, by turning your head around the display, you would actually be able to have a view of any country on the globe, you would be able to see all the way around," Fattal told journalists in a telebriefing.
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Satellite

NASA denies the report that Voyager left solar system

Kerry Sheridan
phys.org
Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:00 UTC
voyager
© NASA/JPL-CaltechArtist's concept of NASA's Voyager spacecraft
The US space agency on Wednesday denied a claim made in a scientific study that its Voyager 1 spacecraft had left the solar system, describing the report as "premature."

Scientists are eagerly awaiting signs that the craft, which was launched in 1977 on a mission to study planets, has become the first man-made object to leave the boundaries of our solar system. A scientific paper that purported to describe this departure appeared on the American Geophysical Union's web site.

It said Voyager 1 "appears to have traveled beyond the influence of the Sun and exited the heliosphere," or the magnetic bubble of charged particles that surround the solar system. Researcher Bill Webber, one of the article's authors, acknowledged that the actual location of the spacecraft - whether in interstellar space or just an unknown region beyond the solar system - remained a matter of debate.

"It's outside the normal heliosphere, I would say that," said Webber, professor emeritus of astronomy at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, according to the AGU's web site. "We're in a new region. And everything we're measuring is different and exciting." Shortly after the study appeared, NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown told AFP the report was "premature and incorrect."
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Info

Ancient giant trees found petrified in Thailand

Larry O'Hanlon
Discovery News
Wed, 20 Mar 2013 09:14 UTC
Petrified Tree
© Marc Philippe, Université de LyonThe largest unbroken petrified tree trunk in the world (right). The reconstructed tree with a modern giraffe beside it for scale.
Fossil trees that approached the heights of today's tallest redwoods have been found in northern Thailand. The longest petrified log measures 72.2 meters (237 feet), which suggest the original tree towered to more than 100 meters (330 feet) in a wet tropical forest some 800,000 years ago.

The trees appear to have been closely related to a species alive today called Koompassia elegans, which belongs to the same family as beans, peas and black locust trees, explained lead author of the study, Marc Philippe of France's University of Lyon. That is to say, the ancient trees are not closely related to today's tallest trees, which are the Eucalyptus (gum trees) of Australia and Sequoia (redwoods) of California. Both of those living trees can reach about 130 meters (425 feet) in height.

Interestingly, there are no trees living today in Thailand that approach the size of the ancients.

"Highest trees nowadays in Thailand are almost 60 meters (200 feet)," wrote Philippe in response to my email query about his new paper coming out in the April issue of the journal Quaternary Science Reviews. "To my knowledge the highest tree yet recorded in Thailand is a Krabak tree, belonging to the Dipterocarpaceae ('tropical oaks'), 58 meters (190 feet) tall."
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Einstein

Complete Neanderthal genome published by German researchers

Shane McGlaun
Slash Gear
Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:08 UTC
Image
A group of German researchers announced this week that they have completed sequencing of a Neanderthal genome. The scientists say that the high-quality sequencing will be made available online for other researchers and scientists to study. The researchers were able to produce the genome using a toe bone found in a Siberian cave.

This published genome is said to be far more detailed than a previous "draft" Neanderthal genome was sequenced three years ago by the same team. The group of researchers operate from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The researchers say that the new genome allows individual inherited traits from the Neanderthal's mother and father to be distinguished.
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Info

Sound waves focused into laserlike beam

Jesse Emspak
Discovery News
Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:04 UTC
Sound Waves
© Imran Mahboob/NTT Basic Research Laboratories
We've all seen laser beams - narrow and powerful beams of light used in everything from CD players to weapons. Now researchers have found a way to make sound waves that, like light waves in a laser, travel in step. They call it a phaser and it could open up applications as wide-ranging as precision timer circuits and better ultrasound scans.

The researchers from NTT Basic Laboratories in Japan call their device a phaser because it uses phonons, waves of sound that require a medium, such as a gas, liquid or solid, to travel.

To create the beam, they started with a tiny drum just a few nanometers across, and put it inside a cavity, which acted like a resonator. They vibrated the drum, which transmitted energy to the cavity, and created the phonons. The cavity confined the sound waves. At a certain frequency, called the resonant frequency, the material of the cavity relaxed in a very specific way, creating vibrations that transferred energy back into the drum. Those vibrations are at a specific frequency and if one connected the resonator to a solid material those vibrations would travel away in a narrow beam. That traveling wave is the "laser" sound beam. Since the sound waves are all in step with each other, they would go in straight lines and wouldn't spread out.
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