Science & TechnologyS


Comet 2

New Comet: C/2013 E2 (IWAMOTO)

Ernesto Guido & Nick Howes
Remanzacco Observatory
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 21:10 UTC
Cbet nr. 3439, issued on 2013, March 14, announces the discovery of a new comet (discovery magnitude ~14) by Masayuki Iwamoto (Awa, Tokushima-ken, Japan) on three 60-s CCD frames taken on March 10.8 & 11.8 with a Pentax 100-mm f/4 lens and a Canon EOS 5D digital camera. The new comet has been designated C/2013 E2 (IWAMOTO).

We performed follow-up measurements of this object remotely, from the iTelescope network (Siding Spring - MPC code Q62) on 2013, March. 14.8, through a 0.50-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD + f/4.5 focal reducer.

Below you can see our image, stack of 5x20-second exposures obtained at the twilight (few minutes before the sunrise) with the Sun only 10 degree below the horizon and the comet +27 degree above the horizon.
C/2013 E2
© Remanzacco Observatory
Here you can see a short animation (composed of 5x20-seconds exposures and spanning 5 minutes) showing the movement of the comet.

M.P.E.C. 2013-E67 assigns the following preliminary parabolic orbital elements to comet C/2013 E2: T 2013 Mar. 5.5; e= 1.0; Peri. = 92.93; q = 1.39; Incl.= 21.90.
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Sherlock

Fossils show primitive birds had four wings: study


Raw Story
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:52 UTC
Image
© AFP Photo
Some primitive birds boasted four wings, before evolution led them to ditch their hind feathers in favor of webbed or scaly feet, scientists in China said on Thursday.

Previous research had uncovered the existence of bird-like dinosaurs with hind limb feathers, but evidence has remained slim in birds, which are widely believed to have evolved from dinosaurs.

And even though the latest discovery documents new evidence of feathered feet in early birds, the question remains whether the plumes were actually a help or a hindrance in flight.

The Chinese scientists behind the study, published in the US journal Science, said the 11 newly described fossil specimens offer evidence the leg feathers were used as a part of a four-winged system for flying.

Researchers found the new trove of data by poring over fossils at China's Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature, said lead researcher Xing Xu, a well-known dinosaur researcher.
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Cow Skull

Best of the Web: Original 'Fall of Eden'? Agriculture is a "profoundly unnatural activity" and the "worst mistake in human history"

Sanjida O'Connell
Telegraph
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:06 UTC
Image
© GettyCereal killer: The introduction of agriculture was followed by malnutrition and disease.
Last week, Sir Paul McCartney urged us, amid a blaze of publicity, to curb our carnivorous lifestyles and go meat-free on Mondays, in order to reduce the damage that modern agriculture does to the planet. But for all the recent talk about the pros and cons of farming, and how the methods we use are affecting the environment, a more basic point has been missed that growing crops might be damaging not just to the environment but to the development of our own species. Could it be that rather than being a boon to mankind, the invention of agriculture was, in the words of one academic, "the worst mistake in human history"?

To understand why this extraordinary suggestion could make sense, you need to visit the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies in Cambridge, a shrine to modern anthropology. Its gates resemble a Cubist take on the DNA double-helix and its clouded glass windows are etched with phrases from Darwin's Origin of Species.

According to Prof Diamond, agriculture evolved about 12,000 years ago, and since then humans have been malnourished and disease-ridden compared with their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Worse, because agriculture allows food to be stockpiled and enables some people to do things other than look for food, it led to the invention of more and better weapons, soldiers, warfare, class divisions between those who had access to food and those who did not, and inequality between the sexes. This idea has been picked up again in a recent book, An Edible History of Humanity, by Tom Standage, which argues that agriculture is a "profoundly unnatural activity".

Comment: Check out last week's SOTT Talk Radio show on this very topic:

Paleo food: Staying Healthy in a GMO world

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Magnify

Gravitational lensing - and a new telescope - reveal ancient starbursts

Matthew Francis
arstechnica.com
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:24 UTC
Image
© Iztok Bončina/ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)Two of the telescopes comprising ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) in Chile.
The galaxies of the Universe's youth worked busily at making stars - that much is certain. However, what did those galaxies look like? How many were there, and how were they distributed in space and time?

Over such huge distances, those galaxies appear faint to us, so it's only within the last decade or so that astronomers have been able to start obtaining a reasonable view of them. The newly inaugurated ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) is one of the most promising telescope arrays in the world for making observations of the early Universe.

As reported in a new Nature paper, ALMA scientists measured the distances to 23 early star-forming galaxies in a patch of sky in the Southern Hemisphere. Out of that sample, at least 10 emitted their light when the Universe was less than 1.5 billion years old, placing them among some of the earliest galaxies observed.

Over the last ten years, astronomers discovered that the ratios of galaxy types shifted greatly over time. One particular type of galaxy - known as a dusty starburst galaxy - was nearly 1,000 times more common in the past than it is today. These galaxies, as their name suggests, form stars at a high rate and are swathed in the molecules collectively known as dust. (Lighter molecules, such as hydrogen H2, oxygen O2, or water H2O, behave as gases, whereas heavier molecules can stick together via static electricity, much as dust bunnies gather under your bed.)

Unshielded light from newborn stars is frequently dominated by blue and ultraviolet emission, but dust absorbs most of those wavelengths. This heats the dust, however, making it glow strongly in the infrared. The result: dusty starburst galaxies are intense infrared emitters.
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Telescope

Astronomers find water vapor in atmosphere of distant planet

Ian Sample
Raw Story
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:55 UTC
Image
© AFP Photo
But planet HR8799c unlikely to harbour life, as surface temperature exceeds 1,000C

Astronomers have detected water vapour and carbon monoxide in the atmosphere of a planet 130 light years away from Earth. However, the planet, known only as HR8799c, is devoid of methane, a gas that can indicate life, the researchers said.

Their analysis was performed using the most precise atmospheric measurements ever made of a planet outside our solar system. The levels of gases shed light on how the planet formed, from a cluster of ice crystals tens of millions of years ago.

Since the 1990s, astronomers have detected more than 1,000 planets beyond our solar system. HR8799c is colossal: about seven times the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. It circles a star with at least three other planets.

To take their readings, scientists peered at the planet through a telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and used an instrument called Osiris to record incoming infrared light. At only 30m years old, the planet is young, extraordinarily hot, and easy to see in the infrared range.
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Cassiopaea

New data boosts case for Higgs Boson find

Gautam Naik
Wall Street Journal
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 10:12 UTC
Image
© APThis image provided by CERN shows a real CMS proton-proton collision in which four high energy electrons, the green lines and red towers, are observed in a 2011 event.
Fresh experimental data bolsters the case that a particle discovered last year is the long-sought Higgs boson, physicists said Thursday.

The Higgs boson is crucial to the current view of how the universe is structured because it is linked to a mechanism that confers mass to elementary particles. It thus helps to explain the presence of stars, planets and other cosmic bodies.

The data collected so far "are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said Joe Incandela, a spokesman for the European particle-physics laboratory CERN, which led the Higgs hunt.

While the data strengthens the likelihood that the elusive Higgs boson has been found, further number-crunching is needed to claim a conclusive discovery.
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Info

Ancient mutation explains missing wisdom teeth

Douglas Main
LiveScience
Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:52 UTC
Wisdom Teeth
© Carlos Caetano | Shutterstock
Boston - Many people have suffered from impacted third molars, also known as wisdom teeth. But there are also a lucky few who are missing a wisdom tooth or two (or even all four). Why do some people have wisdom teeth, while others don't?

The answer, partly hinted at in new research presented here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, could also explain why particular ethnic groups, such as the Inuit, have a particularly low occurrence of wisdom teeth.

Some thousands of years ago, a random mutation arose which suppressed the formation of wisdom teeth, a trait that then spread and now accounts for the lack of wisdom teeth among some modern humans, said Princeton University researcher Alan Mann.

The oldest fossils missing third molars hail from China and are about 300,000 to 400,000 years old, suggesting the first mutation may have arisen there, Mann told LiveScience.

Like most mammals, humans' ancestors had four sets of three molars (for a total of 12, with six in both the upper and lower jaw) used to help chew and grind food. Unlike other mammals, however, humans underwent a period of evolution in which the brain greatly expanded in size, Mann said. This created an architectural problem; with a much larger brain case, the jaw had to become narrower so that it could still connect to the lower part of the skull, Mann said.
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Info

Hundreds of dinosaur egg pieces found


LiveScience
Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:07 UTC
Sauropod
© J.A. Peñas - SINCThis is an artist's impression of the egg-laying of the sauropod Ampelosaurus.
Researchers in northeastern Spain say they've uncovered hundreds of dinosaur egg fossils, including four kinds that had never before been found in the region, thought to be left behind by sauropods millions of years ago.

Eggs, eggshell fragments and dozens of clutches were nestled in the stratigraphic layers of the Tremp geological formation at the site of Coll de Nargó in the Spanish province of Lleida, which was a marshy region during the Late Cretaceous Period, the researchers said.

"Eggshells, eggs and nests were found in abundance and they all belong to dinosaurs, sauropods in particular," the study's leader, Albert García Sellés from the Miquel Crusafont Catalan Palaeontology Institute, told Spanish news agency SINC this week.

"Up until now, only one type of dinosaur egg had been documented in the region: Megaloolithus siruguei," Sellés added. His team found evidence of at least four other species: Cairanoolithus roussetensis, Megaloolithus aureliensis, Megaloolithus siruguei and Megaloolithus baghensis. Megaloolithus eggs are thought to be associated with sauropods, long-necked dinosaurs that were among some of the largest to roman the planet.
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Bulb

Phallus-shaped worm-like creature sheds light on Earth's biodiversity


Raw Story
Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:51 UTC
Image
© AFP Photo
Fossilised forms of a phallus-shaped invertebrate have shed light on a dramatic spurt in Earth's biodiversity that occurred half a billion years ago, Canadian scientists reported on Wednesday.

Remains of 10-centimetre (four-inch) worm-like creatures were found in shale beds in Yoho National Park in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.

The sediment dates back to the mid-Cambrian, a period when the number of species exploded and life forms became more complex.
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Magnify

Scientists map tapeworm DNA


Raw Story
Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:47 UTC
Image
© Shutterstock
Scientists said Wednesday they had unravelled the genetic code of the tapeworm, unearthing data that should lead to more efficient drugs against the dangerous intestinal parasite.

Tapeworms are among the first known parasites of humans, recorded by Hippocrates and Aristotle as long ago as 300 BC.

Published in the journal Nature, the research highlighted genetic similarities between tapeworms and cancer tumours.

The finding suggests existing cancer drugs that suppress cell division and prevent DNA replication point to a novel cure, which would save time and money in development, the authors said.

"These genome sequences are helping us to immediately identify new targets for much-needed drug treatment," Matthew Berriman of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute said in a statement.
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