Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Mummified Dogs Discovered in Peru


Independent Online
Thu, 11 Nov 2010 07:46 UTC
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© Agence France-PresseArchaeologists from the Pucllana museum work at Huaca Pucllana ancient pre Inca site, in Miraflores district, Lima.
Peruvian archaeologists have discovered six mummified dogs, all dating from the 15th century and apparently presented as religious offerings at a major pre-Columbian site just south of Lima.

The dogs "have hair and complete teeth", said Jesus Holguin, an archaeologist at the museum in Pachacamac, located some 25km south of Lima.

Holguin told AFP on Wednesday that experts were still trying to determine their breed.

The mummified remains of four children were also found at the site, archaeologists said. The mummified dogs were found two weeks ago wrapped in cloth and buried in one of Pachacamac's adobe brick pyramids.

Archaeologists believe the animals were offerings related to a funeral, "although we do not know if this was related to an important personality of the Inca period," said archaeologist Isabel Cornejo.
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Telescope

Milky Way Giant "Bubbles" Baffle Astronomers

John Roach
National Geographic News
Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:00 UTC
Image
© NASA
Two huge bubbles that emit gamma rays have been found billowing from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, astronomers have announced.

The previously unseen structures, detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, extend 25,000 light-years north and south from the galactic core.

"We think we know a lot about our own galaxy," Princeton University astrophysicist David Spergel, who was not involved in the discovery, said during a press briefing Tuesday. But "what we see here are these enormous structures ... [that] suggest the presence of an enormous energetic event in the center of our galaxy."

For now the source of all that energy is unclear, said study co-author Doug Finkbeiner, an associate professor of astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Gamma rays are the most energetic forms of light, and in space they tend to come from violent events such as supernovae or from extreme objects such as black holes and neutron stars.

The newfound bubbles, meanwhile, are made of hot, charged gas that's releasing the same amount of energy as a hundred thousand exploding stars.

"So you have to ask, where could energy like that come from" in the Milky Way? Finkbeiner said.
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Chalkboard

Researchers Unlock a Secret of Bacteria's Immune System


Science Daily
Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:00 UTC
A team of Université Laval and Danisco researchers has unlocked a secret of bacteria's immune system. The details of the discovery, which may eventually make it possible to prevent certain bacteria from developing resistance to antibiotics, are presented in the Nov. 4 issue of the journal Nature.

The team led by Professor Sylvain Moineau of Université Laval's Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology, and Bioinformatics showed that this mechanism, called CRISPR/Cas, works by selecting foreign DNA segments and inserting them into very specific locations in a bacterium's genome. These segments then serve as a kind of immune factor in fighting off future invasions by cleaving incoming DNA.

The researchers demonstrated this mechanism using plasmids, DNA molecules that are regularly exchanged by bacteria. The plasmid used in the experiment, which contained a gene for antibiotic resistance, was inserted into bacteria used in making yogurt, Streptococcus thermophilus. Some of the bacteria integrated the segments of DNA from the resistance gene into their genome, and subsequent attempts to reinsert the plasmid into these bacteria failed. "These bacteria had simply been immunized against acquiring the resistance gene, commented Professor Moineau. This phenomenon could explain, among other things, why some bacteria develop antibiotic resistance while others don't."
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Meteor

New Discovered Sundiving Comet


SpaceWeather.com
Sat, 13 Nov 2010 23:06 UTC
New Comet
© SpaceWeather.com
A newly-discovered comet is diving toward the sun, and it will probably not survive the encounter. Click here to view a movie of the death plunge.

Japanese comet hunter Masanori Uchina first noticed the sundiver in coronagraph images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) on Nov. 13th. At the time it was a dim and distant speck, but now the comet is brightening rapidly as it approaches the hot sun. The bright glare of the sun hides these events from human eyes, but not from certain spacecraft: Join SOHO for a ringside seat.
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Telescope

NASA Announces Televised Chandra News Conference

Trent Perrotto
NASA.gov
Sat, 13 Nov 2010 17:15 UTC
NASA will hold a news conference at 12:30 p.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 15, to discuss the Chandra X-ray Observatory's discovery of an exceptional object in our cosmic neighborhood.

The news conference will originate from NASA Headquarters' television studio, 300 E St. SW in Washington and carried live on NASA TV.

Media representatives may attend the conference, join by phone or ask questions from participating NASA locations. To RSVP or obtain dial-in information, journalists must send their name, affiliation and telephone number to Trent Perrotto at: trent.j.perrotto@nasa.gov by 10 a.m. EST on Nov. 15. Reporters wishing to attend the conference in-person must have a valid press credential for access. Non-U.S. media also must bring passports.
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Sun

Sunspot 1123 Hurls Filament toward Earth


NASA.gov
Sat, 13 Nov 2010 16:47 UTC
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© SDO/HMINew sunspot 1123 in the Sun's southern hemisphere is crackling with C-class solar flares.
Coronagraph images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft show a faint coronal mass ejection emerging from the blast site and heading off in a direction just south of the sun-Earth line.

The cloud could deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field sometime on Nov. 14th or 15th. High latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras on those dates.
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© NASA/SDOThis image from the three and a half hour time lapse movie of the flare and filament event.
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Info

J-Pop Star (and 3-D Hologram) Hatsune Miku Sells Out Stadiums

Terrence O'Brien
Switched
Sat, 13 Nov 2010 12:00 UTC
Hatsune Miku
© Switched.comHatsune Miku
Hatsune Miku has topped the pop charts in Japan, sold out stadium concerts and become a legitimate cultural phenomenon. The interesting thing is that Miku doesn't exist -- at least not in any traditional sense of the word. Miku is a computer-generated avatar that performs songs with the help of a live band. But unlike say, Gorillaz, a cartoon band that merely serves as the public face of an artistic collective, everything about Miku comes from a computer. She is the product of a company called Crypton Future Media, which synthesizes Miku's voice using Yamaha's Vocaloid software.

Creating the character -- which appears as a girl with blue pigtails and a cyberpunk version of the traditional Japanese school-girl uniform -- was a meticulous process. First, the creators recorded voice actress Saki Fujita making individual phonetic sounds at a specific pitch and tone. Then, they recombined the samples and fed them through the synthesis software to produce an almost endless number of words and sounds. Users can actually purchase a copy of Miku to run on their home PCs, and have her perform songs of their own creation.
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Book

How Reading Rewires the Brain

Greg Miller
Science NOW
Thu, 11 Nov 2010 13:15 UTC
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© S. Dehaene et al./Science Reading lesson. A new study identifies several brain regions (colored areas) that respond more strongly to text in people who can read.
Written language poses a puzzle for neuroscientists. Unlocking the meaning in a string of symbols requires complex neural circuitry. Yet humans have been reading and writing for only about 5000 years - too short for major evolutionary changes. Instead, reading likely depends on circuits that originally evolved for other purposes. But which ones?

To investigate, cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene of the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, teamed up with colleagues in France, Belgium, Portugal, and Brazil to scan the brains of 63 volunteers, including 31 who learned to read in childhood, 22 who learned as adults, and 10 who were illiterate. Those who could read, regardless of when they learned, exhibited more vigorous responses to written words in several areas of the brain that process what we see, the group reports online today in Science.

Based on previous work, Dehaene has argued that one of these areas, at the junction of the left occipital and temporal lobes of the brain, is especially important for reading. In literate, but not illiterate, people, written words also triggered brain activity in parts of the left temporal lobe that respond to spoken language. That suggests that reading utilizes brain circuits that evolved to support spoken language, a much older innovation in human communication, Dehaene says.
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Black Cat

Cats' Tongues Employ Tricky Physics

Gisela Telis
Science NOW
Thu, 11 Nov 2010 16:39 UTC
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© Amy DuffieldTricky tongue. Jasper, and all other cats, drink water in a very unusual way.
Cats like to do things their own way - even, it seems, when it comes to drinking. Researchers have discovered that felines have their own style of lapping water. Their tongues perform a complex maneuver that pits gravity versus inertia in a delicate balance.

Surprisingly little is known about the physics of lapping. Dogs and many other animals with incomplete cheeks - who can't seal their mouths like we do to produce suction - lap up water by curling their tongues into a ladlelike shape and scooping up the liquid. Most researchers assumed felines do the same, albeit with much smaller, raspier tongues. But Roman Stocker, a biophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, began to doubt this assumption one morning over breakfast. He watched his cat Cutta Cutta lap water from a bowl and began to wonder if there was more to her dainty drinking than met his eye.
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Sun

Northern Lights and John Lennon


Space Weather
Fri, 12 Nov 2010 22:10 UTC
A solar wind stream is buffeting Earth's magnetic field and stirring up auroras around the Arctic Circle. A beacon of light from the John Lennon memorial Imagine Peace Tower pointed to the display over Reykjavik, Iceland, on Nov 11th:

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© Marketa Stanczykova
"The combination of the beacon and the Northern Lights resembled a beautiful flower in the sky--[a nice tribute to Lennon]," says photographer Marketa Stanczykova.

High-latitude sky watchers should remain alert for auroras as the solar wind continues to blow.
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