Science & TechnologyS


Meteor

European Space Agency images of Mars reveal enormous impact craters


ESA.int
Fri, 04 Feb 2011 12:23 UTC
Image
© ESAArabia Terra on Mars
ESA's Mars Express has returned new views of pedestal craters in the Red Planet's eastern Arabia Terra.

Craters are perhaps the quintessential planetary geological feature. So much so that early planetary geologists expended a lot of effort to understand them. You could say they put craters on a pedestal. This latest image of Mars shows how the Red Planet does it in reality.

Craters are the result of impacts by asteroids, comets and meteorites. In a pedestal crater, the surrounding terrain is covered by pulverised rock thrown out of the crater. This material creates a platform or pedestal around the crater often with steep cliffs, and is usually rich in volatile materials such as water and ice.

Arabia Terra is part of the highlands of Mars, stretching east to west across 4500 km in the northern hemisphere, and named for a feature drawn on Giovanni Schiaparelli's 19th-century map of Mars.
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Toys

France sees first 'saviour sibling'

Martin H. Simon
Agence France-Presse
Mon, 07 Feb 2011 03:57 UTC
Image
© unknownFrench doctor Rene Frydman poses in 2010 in his office at Antoine Beclere hospital in Clamart, a Paris suburb. Doctors in France on Monday announced the country's first birth of a "saviour sibling," selected at the embryonic stage to be a close genetic match to save a brother or sister suffering from a fatal inherited disorder
Doctors in France on Monday announced the country's first birth of a "saviour sibling," selected at the embryonic stage to be a close genetic match to save a brother or sister suffering from a fatal inherited disorder.

The baby was born at the Antoine Beclere Hospital in Clamart, in the suburbs of Paris, said doctors Rene Frydman and Arnold Munnich.

The child, born to parents of Turkish origin and named Umut-Talha (Turkish for "our hope"), was conceived through in-vitro fertilisation and was born on January 26 with a weight of 3.65 kilos (8.03 pounds), they said.

"He is in good health," Frydman told AFP.
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Meteor

Meteorite crater found on mount Ararat?


News.com
Tue, 08 Feb 2011 08:31 UTC
Ararat crater meteorite
Astrophysicists Vahe Gurzadyan from the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia and Sverre Aarseth from the University of Cambridge in the UK, discovered an unrecorded crater that raises the possibility that the biblical mountain Ararat was struck by a meteorite.

A British scientific publication OBSERVATORY will soon publish an article about the discovery. However, after appearing on the University Cornell website it had already spread around the world.

Mount Ararat is an ancient, isolated volcano in eastern Turkey near the borders with Armenia.

The northern and western slopes of the mountain are closed to public but somehow the two physicists gained access.
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Beaker

Super-thin materials could power our world

Chris Mellor
The Register
Mon, 07 Feb 2011 02:43 UTC
Basic research on 1-atom-thick nanosheets shows many hypothetical uses

Oxford and Dublin boffins have unlocked a doorway leading to more than 150 super-thin exotic nanosheet materials just one atom thick.

The names sound like a chemist's molecular roll call: boron nitride (BN), molybdenum disulphide (MoS2), and bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3). None of these compounds are new - but single-atom-thick* crystals or flakes made of of these compounds would be. Freed from characteristics caused as a result of them being in instantiations multiple atoms thick, they can - among other things - become vastly better thermoelectric devices, generating electricity from heat.

The research was carried out by a team of boffins led by CRANN (Center for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices), Dublin's Trinity College and the University of Oxford. What this team has done, following the example set by Russian Nobel Prize-winning boffins last year with graphene, a similarly two-dimensional material - if you regard single-atom thickness as being equivalent to having no thickness dimension. Individual flakes of graphene have electronic and mechanical properties that are very different from its parent crystal material, graphite.
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Display

Google does fractals in HTML5

Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Register
Mon, 07 Feb 2011 02:45 UTC
Take a break with Julia and Mandelbrot

Fractals. They're porn for techies. Well, truth be told, porn is porn for techies. But fractals aren't far behind.

Fractals are far more interesting, at least in the long run. And you can look at fractals at the office without worrying if the boss will walk by.

If you're a techie, it's time you visited Google Labs project that uses the browser to render fractal images describing various Julia and Mandelbrot sets.

According to a blog post from Google software engineer Daniel Wolf, the fractal renderer is coded in HTML5 using the Google Maps API to allow you to zoom in and out on a fractal image and pan around the image as well.

fractal
© The Register
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Saturn

Major Storm Still Underway On Saturn


SpaceWeather
Mon, 07 Feb 2011 22:42 UTC
A vast thunderstorm that erupted on Saturn during the closing weeks of 2010 is still going strong. "It looks like a comet plowing through Saturn's northern hemisphere," reports amateur astronomer Christopher Go. He took these pictures on Feb. 5th using an 11-inch Celestron telescope in Cebu City, the Philippines:

Storm on Saturn
© Christopher Go (Cebu, Philippines)
"The storm is very bright," says Go. "I spent a few minutes observing it visually (through the eyepiece) and it is very prominent."

Researchers call the storm the "northern electrostatic disturbance" because (1) it is in Saturn's northern hemisphere and (2) it is strongly charged with lightning. Receivers onboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft are picking up radio crackles each time a bolt discharges--much like the static you hear on a car radio when driving through an electrical storm on Earth.

The storm is stretching around much of Saturn's northern hemisphere--and growing longer. This means there a good chance of catching it no matter when you look. Amateur astronomers are encouraged to monitor developments. Saturn may be found high in the southern sky before dawn shining like a yellow 1st-magnitude star.
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Family

US:KU Exec's Study Honored by Autism Organization


The Associated Press
Mon, 07 Feb 2011 20:19 UTC
A national autism organization has hailed the discovery by a University of Kansas vice chancellor and his colleagues that children with autism have a unique vocal signature.

Steven Warren, University of Kansas vice chancellor for research and graduate studies, co-authored the study, which was headed by Kimbrough Oller, professor and chair of excellence in audiology and speech language pathology at the University of Memphis.

The organization Autism Speaks named the discovery as one of the top 10 autism research achievements of 2010 and said it could potentially affect how autism is screened, assessed and treated.
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Beaker

Galapagos receives EUR2.7 million grant for antiviral drug discovery


Trading Markets.com
Mon, 07 Feb 2011 13:31 UTC
Galapagos NV (Euronext: GLPG) announced today that it has been awarded a EUR2.7 million grant from the Flemish agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT) to progress its proprietary antiviral drug discovery research programs.

The two-year IWT-funded project focuses on progressing novel mode-of-action small molecules that have shown antiviral activity in laboratory models, with the goal to deliver a first preclinical candidate within one year. Galapagos will collaborate on this project with the research group of Professor Johan Neyts at the Rega Institute for Medical Research at the KU Leuven, which has a long-standing expertise in developing novel strategies to treat viral infections.

These antiviral programs focus on blocking the activity of a protein in the human body that is essential for a number of important pathogenic viruses to carry out their own reproduction. The compounds have demonstrated potent antiviral activity against a wide variety of normal and resistant strains. The key priorities for this project are to advance compounds against human rhinovirus (HRV), the virus that causes the common cold, and hepatitis C virus (HCV).
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Sherlock

Russia poised to breach mysterious Antarctic lake

Alissa de Carbonnel
Reuters
Fri, 04 Feb 2011 12:00 UTC
Image
© UnknownLake Vostok has been sealed off from the rest of the world for 15 million years
For 15 million years, an icebound lake has remained sealed deep beneath Antarctica's frozen crust, possibly hiding prehistoric or unknown life. Now Russian scientists are on the brink of piercing through to its secrets.

"There's only a bit left to go," Alexei Turkeyev, chief of the Russian polar Vostok Station, told Reuters by satellite phone. His team has drilled for weeks in a race to reach the lake, 3,750 meters (12,000 ft) beneath the polar ice cap, before the end of the brief Antarctic summer.

It was here that the coldest temperature ever found on Earth -- minus 89.2 Celsius (minus 128.6 Fahrenheit) -- was recorded.

With the rapid onset of winter, scientists will be forced to leave on the last flight out for this season, on Feb 6.
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Sun

First Ever STEREO Images of the Entire Sun

Dr. Tony Phillips
Science News, NASA
Sun, 06 Feb 2011 00:00 UTC
It's official: The sun is a sphere.

On Feb. 6th, NASA's twin STEREO probes moved into position on opposite sides of the sun, and they are now beaming back uninterrupted images of the entire star - front and back.

"For the first time ever, we can watch solar activity in its full 3-dimensional glory," says Angelos Vourlidas, a member of the STEREO science team at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC.

NASA released a 'first light' 3D movie on, naturally, Super Bowl Sunday:
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