Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Strange Hyperactive Galaxies Spotted by Hubble Telescope


SPACE.com
Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:12 UTC
dwarf galaxies
© NASA, ESA, A. van der Wel (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy), H. Ferguson and A. Koekemoer (Space Telescope Science Institute), and the CANDELS teamThis image reveals 18 tiny galaxies uncovered by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The dwarf galaxies, shown in the insets, existed 9 billion years ago and are brimming with star birth.
Astronomers have discovered a strange population of tiny, distant galaxies forming stars at a surprisingly rapid clip.

The researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope to spot the 69 hyperactive dwarf galaxies, which are about 9 billion light-years away from Earth. They're churning out stars so fast that their stellar population would double in just 10 million years. By contrast, it took the Milky Way 1,000 times longer to double its number of stars, researchers said.

The new results are unexpected, since they're somewhat at odds with other recent studies of ancient dwarf galaxies.

"Those studies suggest that star formation was a relatively slow process, stretching out over billions of years," study co-author Harry Ferguson, of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), said in a statement. Ferguson is co-leader of the survey that found the dwarf galaxies, which is called the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS).

"The CANDELS finding that there were galaxies of roughly the same size forming stars at very rapid rates at early times is forcing us to re-examine what we thought we knew about dwarf galaxy evolution," Ferguson added.
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Magnify

Gemological Institute of America tests Extraterrestrial Peridot specimens


Diamond World News Service
Fri, 04 Nov 2011 17:03 UTC
Peridot
Scientists and researchers have discovered 'extraterrestrial samples' of the gem Peridot - an olive-green gem which is also found on earth. These extraterrestrial samples were recovered from meteorites on occasion. To understand the difference of properties between the Peridot gem found on earth and those recovered from the meteorites, researchers at GIA (Gemological Institute of America) assembled 26 extraterrestrial samples and the findings are reported in GIA's Gems & Gemology's Fall 2011 issue.

GIA researchers assembled specimens from several terrestrial locales and compared them with 26 samples taken from the Esquel meteorite, the most notable peridot-bearing extraterrestrial object discovered in Argentina about 50 years ago, this massive meteorite contained numerous peridot crystals. An American collector purchased most of the Esquel in 1992 and divided it into a number of sections for sale. Three of the Esquel samples examined by GIA were faceted gemstones, while the others were part of polished slabs. The GIA team discovered significant differences between earthly and extraterrestrial peridot - including different levels of lithium, vanadium, nickel, manganese, cobalt and zinc between the two - allowing researchers and ultimately gem buyers to confidently distinguish between peridot of different worlds.
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Rocket

Russian Probe Fails to Take Route for Mars


The Telegraph, UK
Thu, 10 Nov 2011 04:07 UTC
A Russian probe on a mission to a moon of Mars has failed to take its course to the red planet, in a potentially devastating blow to Moscow's hopes of resuming planetary exploration.


The Phobos-Grunt probe blasted off successfully from the Baikonur cosmodrome overnight but did not manage to leave its Earth orbit as planned several hours later to go on its planned trajectory for Mars, the Russian space agency said.

Engineers now have three days to send the probe out to Mars while batteries last. The loss of the probe would be a disaster for Russia, which has not had a single successful planetary mission since the fall of the Soviet Union.

"We have three days while the batteries are still working," said Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin. "I would not say it's a failure. It's a non-standard situation, but it is a working situation."
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Laptop

China: Researchers Simulate World's First Complete H1N1 Influenza Virus

Tiffany Kaiser
Daily Tech
Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:30 UTC
Chinese researchers used the Mole-8.5 GPU-accelerated supercomputer to simulate the entire H1N1 influenza virus
Image
© UnknownH1N1 influenza virus

Scientists at the Institute of Process Engineering of Chinese Academy of Sciences have successfully produced the first computer simulation of a complete H1N1 influenza virus using NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, which could lead to a better understanding of the virus and eventually enhanced treatments.

Up until now, studying viruses has been challenging in laboratories because reactions occur too quickly to observe. Also, creating computer simulations was a difficult task because of the complexity associated with simulating "billions" of particles in the correct conditions.

But now, Dr. Ying Ren, assistant professor at the Institute of Process Engineering of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a team of researchers, have used the Mole-8.5 GPU-accelerated supercomputer to simulate the whole H1N1 influenza virus.

The Mole-8.5 GPU-accelerated supercomputer contains 288 server nodes and over 2,200 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. The Tesla GPU is NVIDIA's first dedicated General Purpose GPU and targets the high performance computing market due to its high computational power.

"The Mole-8.5 GPU supercomputer is enabling us to perform scientific research that was not possible before," said Ren. "This research is an important step in developing more effective ways to control epidemics and create anti-viral drugs."

By creating a molecular dynamics simulation application, the researchers were able to achieve 770 picoseconds per day with an integration time step of 1 femtosecond for 300 million radicals.
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Robot

Texas Scientist Makes Strands of Invisibility Cloak

Liz Goodwin
Yahoo! News: The Lookout
Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:02 UTC
Image
© UT DallasAliev's invisibility threads in the process of disappearing.
A University of Texas scientist is working on developing a technology that would delight Harry Potter fans everywhere--an invisibility cloak.

Ali Aliev uses carbon nanotubes--which look like pieces of thread--and then heats them up rapidly until the objects beneath them effectively disappear.You can watch the threads disappear as they are heated up in this video.

So how do the threads work? In a paper published in Nanotechnology in June, Aliev explains that the invisibility cloak exploits the "mirage effect." A highway can become so hot that small circles that look like puddles of water appear in the road. That happens when the road is so hot that the surface bends the light around it, so that the driver sees the reflected sky instead of the pavement. The carbon nanotubes create a similar effect.
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Bizarro Earth

Africa's Western Black Rhino Officially Extinct

Tiffany Kaiser
Daily Tech
Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:31 UTC
Poaching is largely the reason for the western black rhino's extinction
Image
© animalsnomore.comWestern Black Rhino

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has announced that Africa's western black rhino is officially extinct.

The western black rhino (Diceros bicornis longipes) is a rare subspecies of the Black Rhinoceros. At one time, it was widespread in the savanna of central-west Africa.

The IUCN declared the western black rhino extinct in the annual update of its Red List, which was founded in 1963 and serves as an inventory of the global conservation status of biological species.

Poaching is largely the reason for the western black rhino's extinction. Criminal gangs resort to poaching in order to trade these rhinos' horns, which are valuable.
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Stormtrooper

Pentagon Regrowing Soldiers' Muscles From Pig Cells

Katie Drummond
Wired
Thu, 10 Nov 2011 06:00 UTC
Image
© McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine
A few pig cells, a single surgery and a rigorous daily workout: They're the three ingredients that patients will need to re-grow fresh, functional slabs of their own muscle, courtesy of Pentagon-backed science that's already being used to rebuild parts of people.

The research team behind the project, based out of the University of Pittsburgh, has made remarkably swift progress: Mere months after starting their first-ever clinical trial, they've already operated on four soldiers and are now training groups of surgeons from across the country in perfecting the approach. If progress continues at this pace, the trial will wrap in 24 months and the technique will become "a standard of care for orthopedists and trauma surgeons," according to Dr. Stephen Badylak, head of the initiative.

It isn't quite salamander territory, but it's astonishingly close. The Pittsburgh team's research means that, within this decade, the thousands of soldiers who've suffered major muscle loss during this decade's wars can overcome devastating impairment - a life sentence of chronic pain, disability and no viable treatment short of amputation - and experience at least a 25 percent improvement in physical function. For civilians, the impact would incalculable. The kinds of trauma and health problems that now cause amputation, from car accidents and fires to cancer or diabetic peripheral vascular disease, would no longer cause irreparable damage.
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Blackbox

Mystery of Moon's Lost Magnetism Solved?

Clara Moskowitz
SPACE.com
Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:15 UTC
One of the abiding mysteries of our moon is why it apparently once had a magnetic field. Now two teams of scientists have offered two separate, but potentially complementary, explanations.
Image
© M.-H. Deproost, ORB, BelgiqueThis illustration shows one suggested mechanism for creating an ancient magnetic field on the moon. In this scenario, impacting space rocks on the moon would create instability in the moon's core that could lead to a dynamo that creates a magnetic field.

When Apollo astronauts brought back samples of moon rocks from their lunar landing missions in the 1960s and '70s, some of them shocked scientists by being magnetic. That means that individual rocks might have a magnetic north and south pole and a small magnetic field of their own.

This can happen to rocks with the right minerals inside them, if they cool in the presence of a magnetic field. The problem is, scientists had no idea that the moon had ever had a magnetic field, and were at a loss to explain how that might have happened.
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Chalkboard

Fibonacci: the man who figured out flowers

Keith Devlin
The Telegraph
Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:39 UTC
Fibonacci numbers math
© AlamyLeonardo of Pisa, or 'Fibonacci', and (right) a sunflower, the seeds of which display Fibonacci numbers
A new book reveals how a 13th-century tome on arithmetic has shaped modern finance and explains some mysteries of nature, says Keith Devlin.

Try to imagine a day without numbers. Try to imagine getting through the first hour of that day. No alarm clock, no time, no date, no television or radio, no stock market report or sports results in the newspapers, no bank account to check.

The fact is, our lives depend on numbers. You may not have "a head for figures", but you certainly have a head full of them. Most of what we do each day is conditioned by numbers. Indeed, the degree to which our modern society depends on those that are hidden from us was made clear by the financial meltdown in 2008, when overconfident reliance on the advanced mathematics of the credit market led to a collapse of the global financial system.

How did we become so familiar with, and so reliant on, these abstractions that our ancestors invented just a few thousand years ago? By the latter part of the first millennium AD, the system we use today to write numbers and do arithmetic had been worked out - expressing any number using just the 10 numerals 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing them by the procedures we are all taught in primary school. This familiar way to write numbers and do arithmetic is known as the Hindu-Arabic system, a name that reflects its history.
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Info

Costs of 'Expensive' Human Brain Still Up For Debate

Jennifer Welsh
Live Science
Wed, 09 Nov 2011 11:33 UTC
Human Brain Size
© Dannyphoto80 | Dreamstime.comDo our bigger brains drag our bodies down? A theory suggests that because our brains use so much energy, our bodies have to cope by shortening our guts. By studying brain and organ size in humans and 100 other mammals, research suggests that this just wasn't true. Brain size didn't mean that any give mammal had to skimp on other organs.
Half a million years ago, the human brain started expanding. Bigger brains need more energy to keep trucking, but scientists have been stumped as to where we found this extra juice when our metabolic rate, which is how we churn out energy, is on par with our pea-brained cousins.

One recent theory suggests that our brain's need for energy was fed by a smaller gut, since an easier-to-digest diet would free up energy from the gut to build up the brain. New research suggests this might not be the case, that storing energy in our fat deposits is more important.

"Animals with big brains, they had very low adipose [fat] tissue. Animals that had large adipose tissues had smaller brains," study researcher Ana Navarrete, of the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, told LiveScience. "Either you have a much [bigger] brain or a lot of adipose tissue. Usually they are mutually exclusive."
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