Science & TechnologyS


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Get Rid of NASA Completely, Says Apollo Astronaut

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© unknownHarrison Schmitt
NASA should be scrapped in favor of a new agency, one with the sole objective of furthering America's exploration of deep space. So says Harrison Schmitt, the last man to set foot on the moon, in a proposal published online today (May 25).

Schmitt, a member of Apollo 17 in 1972 and later a one-term U.S. senator, proposed that the new space agency be called the National Space Exploration Administration.

Fifty years after John F. Kennedy's famous speech that set America on its glorious path to the moon, Schmitt, 75, said NASA has lost its focus. The Apollo program helped win the Cold War, strengthened national unity and set up the United States to take control of lunar resources, but NASA has withered under later presidencies, including Barack Obama's, Schmitt said.

"I don't blame NASA as much as I blame various administrations for not recognizing the geopolitical importance of space," he told SPACE.com. [Video: President Kennedy's Moonshot Moment]

Telescope

Scouring Space for Life: More Earths Out There than We Thought?

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Planet hunting is by far the hottest area of astronomy these days, and just about everyone who's in on the search is looking for the same thing: a distant world where life could exist, at least in theory. That means a world more or less the size of Earth, orbiting its parent star in the habitable zone - the location, just the right distance away from its sun's heat, where water can exist in liquid form. Size or distance alone aren't good enough: an Earth-size planet that's too hot or too cold probably couldn't support life, and a giant gasbag like Jupiter couldn't either, even if its temperature were ideal.

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Did Quiet Sun Cause Little Ice Age After All?

Ice Age
© Hendrick Avercamp / Wikimedia CommonsBrrr ... Cold winters in 17th century Europe, as shown in this painting by Hendrick Avercamp, may have been caused by a lack of solar activity after all.

Boston - For decades, astronomers and climatologists have debated whether a prolonged 17th century cold spell, best documented in Europe, could have been caused by erratic behavior of the sun. Now, an American solar physicist says he has new evidence to suggest that the sun was indeed the culprit.

The sun isn't as constant as it appears. Instead, its surface is regularly beset by storms of swirling magnetic fields. As a result, like a teenager plagued with acne, the face of the sun often sprouts relatively dark and short-lived "sunspots," which appear when strong magnetic fields inhibit the upwelling of hotter gas from below. The number of those spots waxes and wanes regularly in an 11-year cycle. However, even that cycle isn't immutable.

In 1893, English astronomer Edward Maunder, studying historical records, noted that the cycle essentially stopped between 1645 and 1715. Instead, the sun was almost devoid of sunspots during this period. In 1976, American solar physicist John "Jack" Eddy suggested there might have been a causal link between this "Maunder Minimum" in the number of sunspots and the contemporaneous Little Ice Age, when average temperatures in Europe were a degree centigrade lower than normal.

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Hubble Finds "Oddball" Stars in Milky Way Hub

Straggler
© NASA, ESA, W. Clarkson (Indiana University and UCLA), and K. Sahu (STScI)
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope to peer deep into the central bulge of our galaxy have found a population of rare and unusual stars. Dubbed "blue stragglers", these stars seem to defy the aging process, appearing to be much younger than they should be considering where they are located. Previously known to exist within ancient globular clusters, blue stragglers have never been seen inside our galaxy's core - until now.

The stars were discovered following a seven-day survey in 2006 called SWEEPS - the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search - that used Hubble to search a section of the central portion of our Milky Way galaxy, looking for the presence of Jupiter-sized planets transiting their host stars. During the search, which examined 180,000 stars, Hubble spotted 42 blue stragglers.

Of the 42 it's estimated that 18 to 37 of them are genuine.

What makes blue stragglers such an unusual find? For one thing, stars in the galactic hub should appear much older and cooler... aging Sun-like stars and old red dwarfs. Scientists believe that the central bulge of the Milky Way stopped making new stars billions of years ago. So what's with these hot, blue, youthful-looking "oddballs"? The answer may lie in their formation.

Info

What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters

Bitcoin
© Technology Review, MIT

Recent weeks have been exciting for a relatively new kind of currency speculator. In just three weeks, the total value of a unique new digital currency called Bitcoin has jumped four times, to over $40 million.

Bitcoin is underwritten not by a government, but by a clever cryptographic scheme.

For now, little can be bought with bitcoins, and the new currency is still a long way from competing with the dollar. But this explainer lays out what Bitcoin is, why it matters, and what needs to happen for it to succeed.

Where does Bitcoin come from?

In 2008, a programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto - a name believed to be an alias - posted a paper outlining Bitcoin's design to a cryptography e-mail list. Then, in early 2009, he (or she) released software that can be used to exchange bitcoins using the scheme. That software is now maintained by a volunteer open-source community coordinated by four core developers.

"Satoshi's a bit of a mysterious figure," says Jeff Garzik, a member of that core team and founder of Bitcoin Watch, which tracks the Bitcoin economy. "I and the other core developers have occasionally corresponded with him by e-mail, but it's always a crapshoot as to whether he responds," says Garzik. "That and the forum are the entirety of anyone's experience with him."

Cloud Lightning

Surprise!: Live Bacteria Help Create Rain, Snow & Hail

Bacteria Hail
© NOAA Photo Library, NOAA Central Library; OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL)Large hail collects on streets and grass during severe thunderstorm. Larger stones appear to be nearly 2 to 3 inches in diameter.

Living bacteria that get whipped up into the sky may be just the spark needed for rain, snow and even hailstorms, research now finds.

Alexander Michaud of Montana State University in Bozeman, Mont., found large amounts of bacteria at the centers of giant hailstones.

Traditionally, researchers have thought that minerals or other particulates in clouds caused water droplets to glom together until they were large enough to fall as raindrops, snowflakes and hail. The new research shows that a large variety of bacteria, and even fungi, diatoms and algae, persist in the clouds and can be used as precipitation starters, a growing field of study called bioprecipitation. (In order for snow, say, to fall from clouds, particles around which ice crystals can form - called ice nuclei - are needed.)

"Minerals were thought to be the dominant ice nucleators in the atmosphere, but they aren't nearly as active as biological particles," said Brent Christner, a microbiologist studying bioprecipitation at Louisiana State University who is presenting the work today (May 24) at the General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans.

Telescope

Nearby Supernova Factory Ramps Up

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© NASA
A local supernova factory has recently started production, according to a wealth of new data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory on the Carina Nebula. This discovery may help astronomers better understand how some of the Galaxy's heaviest and youngest stars race through their lives and release newly-forged elements into their surroundings.

Located in the Sagittarius-Carina arm of the Milky Way a mere 7,500 light years from Earth, the Carina Nebula has long been a favorite target for astronomers using telescopes tuned to a wide range of wavelengths. Chandra's extraordinarily sharp X-ray vision has detected over 14,000 stars in this region, revealed a diffuse X-ray glow, and provided strong evidence that supernovas have already occurred in this massive complex of young stars.

"The Carina Nebula is one of the best places we know to study how young massive stars live and die," said Leisa Townsley of Penn State University, who led the large Chandra campaign to observe Carina. "Now, we have a compelling case that a supernova show in Carina has already begun."

One important piece of evidence is an observed deficit of bright X-ray sources in Trumpler 15, one of ten star clusters in the Carina complex.

"This suggests that some of the massive stars in Trumpler 15 have already been destroyed in supernova explosions," said Junfeng Wang of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass, first author of a paper on this cluster. "These stars were likely between 20 and 40 times the mass of the Sun and would have exploded in the last few million years, which is very recent in cosmic terms."

Telescope

Odd Orbits Mark Discovery of New Alien Planets

Kepler alien planets
© Jason Rowe and Kepler teamThis illustration shows all 1,235 of the potential alien planet candidates NASA's Kepler mission has found to date. The planets are pictured crossing front of their host stars, which are all represented to scale.
Alien solar systems with multiple planets appear to be common in our galaxy, but most of them are quite different than our own, a new study finds.

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope detected 1,235 alien planet candidates in its first four months of operation. Of those, 408 reside in multiple-planet systems, suggesting that our own configuration of multiple worlds orbiting a single star isn't so special.

What may be special, however, is the orientation of our solar system's planets. Some of them are tilted significantly off the solar system's plane, while most of the Kepler systems are nearly as flat as a tabletop, researchers said.

Evil Rays

The Invisible iPhone

Invisible Phone
© Hasso Plattner InstitutePoint and click: The “imaginary phone” determines which iPhone app a person wants to use by matching his or her finger position to the position of the app on the screen.

A new interface lets you keep your phone in your pocket and use apps or answer calls by tapping your hand.

Over time, using your smart-phone touch screen becomes second nature, to the point where you can even do some tasks without looking. Researchers in Germany are now working on a system that would let you perform such actions without even holding the phone - instead you'd tap your palm, and the movements would be interpreted by an "imaginary phone" system that would relay the request to your actual phone.

The concept relies on a depth-sensitive camera to pick up the tapping and sliding interactions on a palm, software to analyze the video, and a wireless radio to send the instructions back to the iPhone. Patrick Baudisch, professor of computer science at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, says the imaginary phone prototype "serves as a shortcut that frees users from the necessity to retrieve the actual physical device."

Baudisch and his team envision someone doing dishes when his smart phone rings. Instead of quickly drying his hands and fumbling to answer, the imaginary phone lets him simply slide a finger across his palm to answer it remotely.

Question

Why are Supermassive Black Holes at Galactic Cores Spinning Faster than Ever in the History of the Universe?

Spinning Black Hole
© The Daily Galaxy

British astronomers have found that the giant black holes in the centers of galaxies are on average spinning faster than at any time in the history of the Universe. Dr. Alejo Martinez-Sansigre of the University of Portsmouth and Prof. Steve Rawlings of the University of Oxford made the new discovery by using radio, optical and X-ray data. They publish their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

There is strong evidence that every galaxy has a massive black hole in its center that has masses of between a million and a billion Suns. They cannot be seen directly, but material swirls around the black hole in a so-called accretion disk before its final demise. That material can become very hot and emit radiation including X-rays that can be detected by space-based telescopes whilst associated radio emission can be detected by telescopes on the ground.

Twin jets are often associated with black holes and their accretion disks. There are many factors that can cause these jets to be produced, but the spin of the supermassive black hole is believed to be important. However, there are conflicting predictions about how the spins of the black holes should be evolving and until now this evolution was not well understood.