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Ducklings Following Dog Explained

Amy Enchelmeyer
Discovery News
Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:28 UTC
Dogs & Ducklings_1
© Frances Marsh
Ducklings following in a line behind a mother duck is enough to turn heads and elicit a few "awwws." But ducklings following a dog? Now that's worthy of Animal Planet's Wall of Fame where this photo first appeared.

While it might look like a strange friendship between two species, this adorable, multi-animal, fluffy overload is actually the byproduct of thousands of years of avian evolution.

"There's nothing unique here at work," according to Sara Hallager, a bird biologist at the National Zoo. "All baby birds, when they're born, the first thing they see, which is usually the same species, is what they imprint on."
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A Big Surprise from the Edge of the Solar System

Dr. Tony Phillips
Science NASA
Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:02 UTC
NASA's Voyager probes are truly going where no one has gone before. Gliding silently toward the stars, 9 billion miles from Earth, they are beaming back news from the most distant, unexplored reaches of the solar system.

Mission scientists say the probes have just sent back some very big news indeed.

It's bubbly out there.

"The Voyager probes appear to have entered a strange realm of frothy magnetic bubbles," says astronomer Merav Opher of Boston University. "This is very surprising."


According to computer models, the bubbles are large, about 100 million miles wide, so it would take the speedy probes weeks to cross just one of them. Voyager 1 entered the "foam-zone" around 2007, and Voyager 2 followed about a year later. At first researchers didn't understand what the Voyagers were sensing--but now they have a good idea.
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Bizarro Earth

Keeping an eye on Yellowstone's supervolcano

Natalie Wolchover
MSNBC / Life's Little Mysteries
Thu, 09 Jun 2011 09:47 UTC
Image
© National Park ServiceYellowstone is an active volcano. Surface features such as geysers and hot springs are direct results of the region's underlying volcanism.
When next 'big one' will be is anyone's guess - but you don't want to be here

It's no mere doomsday pseudoscience: The Yellowstone supervolcano really could be the end of us all. When the Yellowstone Caldera - the name of the national park's geographic structure, which roughly translates as "caldron" - blows its lid, much of the continental United States will get covered in a blanket of ash. That ash will clog the atmosphere enough to block out the sun, disrupting the global climate enough to cause mass extinctions.

The last full-scale eruption of that kind occurred 640,000 years ago, and the ones prior to that occurred 1.3 million years and 2.1 million years ago. Interspersed with the big ones have been smaller-scale but still major eruptions, most recently 70,000 years ago.

At the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO), an outpost run by the U.S. Geological Survey in conjunction with Yellowstone National Park and the University of Utah, a team of volcanologists continuously monitors the sleeping giant's tectonic activity. They listen to its rumblings (which are streamed online in real time) for clues as to what's brewing below the surface. Jacob Lowenstern, scientist-in-charge at YVO, told us what they're listening for and what they know so far about the next "big one."
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Laptop

Facebook in New Privacy Row Over Facial Recognition Feature

Charles Arthur
The Guardian, UK
Wed, 08 Jun 2011 02:14 UTC
Facebook
© AlamyThe new Facebook feature uses facial recognition technology to speed up the process of labeling friends and acquaintances in photos.
Social network turns on new feature to automatically identify people in photos, raising questions about privacy implications of the service

Facebook has come under fire for quietly expanding the availability of technology to automatically identify people in photos, renewing concerns about its privacy practices.

The feature, which the giant social network automatically enabled for its more than 500 million users, has been expanded from the US to "most countries", Facebook said on its official blog on Tuesday.

Marc Rotenberg, president of the non-profit privacy advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the system raised questions about which personally identifiable information, such as email addresses, would become associated with the photos in Facebook's database.

He also criticised Facebook's decision to automatically enable the facial-recognition technology for its users.

"I'm not sure that's the setting that people would want to choose. A better option would be to let people opt-in," he said.

Internet security consultancy Sophos noted that many Facebook users had seen the facial recognition option turned on without any notice in the last few days.
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Magnet

Researchers discover 'superatoms' with magnetic shells


Virginia Commonwealth University
Wed, 08 Jun 2011 18:55 UTC
A team of Virginia Commonwealth University scientists has discovered a new class of 'superatoms' - a stable cluster of atoms that can mimic different elements of the periodic table - with unusual magnetic characteristics.

The superatom contains magnetized magnesium atoms, an element traditionally considered as non-magnetic. The metallic character of magnesium along with infused magnetism may one day be used to create molecular electronic devices for the next generation of faster processors, larger memory storage and quantum computers.

In a study published online in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team reports that the newly discovered cluster consisting of one iron and eight magnesium atoms acts like a tiny magnet that derives its magnetic strength from the iron and magnesium atoms. The combined unit matches the magnetic strength of a single iron atom while preferentially allowing electrons of specific spin orientation to be distributed throughout the cluster.
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Telescope

A planet going the wrong way


Physorg
Wed, 08 Jun 2011 16:42 UTC
Wrong way planet
© NASA

All planets move around their stars in the same direction as the star spins - at least that's what we thought. But now Australian National University astronomer Dr. Daniel Bayliss and his colleagues have found a planet that breaks the mold.

Dr. Bayliss, from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, is one of 16 early-career scientists unveiling their research to the public at Fresh Science - a national program sponsored by the Australian Government.

Using one of the world's largest telescopes in Chile, Daniel and his collaborators discovered that a distant planet WASP-17b is moving in the opposite direction to the spin of the star around which it orbits. The discovery throws traditional theories about how planets form around stars into doubt.

Planets form from the same disk of rotating material that gives birth to the star around which they move. So until now it has been assumed that any planets orbiting a star would be moving in the same direction as the star's spin. This is certainly true in our own Solar System.

WASP-17b is quite different, Dr. Bayliss says, and its backwards motion is somewhat of a mystery to scientists.
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Fish

AC/DC Is The Preferred Music Of Sharks


The Frisky
Wed, 08 Jun 2011 15:59 UTC
Sharks and ACDC

After a long day of swimming and preying on sea life, sharks need to take a load off just like us humans. Instead of watching massive amounts of reality TV (not that I've ever done that), researchers have found that sharks enjoy some tunes to help them relax. According to a team studying the effects of music on a group of great white sharks in Australia, AC/DC - more specifically the song "You Shook Me All Night Long" - has been shown to calm the animals.

When hearing that particular hard-rock anthem, the sharks became inquisitive and much less aggressive. Some of them even rubbed their faces along the speaker in a gesture of affection. I wonder if something like Enya would have the opposite effect and make them bloodthirsty? Not that I have any desire to find out.
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Info

New Type of Supernova Outshines The Rest

Colin Stuart
Physics World
Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:51 UTC
New Type of Supernova
© Caltech/Robert Quimby and NatureBefore and after images of four hydrogen-poor superluminous supernovae discovered by the Palomar Transient Factory. In each case, the supernovae shine far brighter than all other stars combined in their host galaxies.

A new type of supernova that shines up to 10 times brighter than any previously recorded has been discovered by an international team of astronomers. However, the team has yet to explain the exact mechanism that drives this new type of exploding star, with existing models failing to reproduce the radiation emanating from this new class of violent events.

Supernovae - highly energetic events caused by the explosion of a star - can often shine brighter than an entire galaxy for a brief period of time. To date, three mechanisms have been used to explain the vast amount of associated radiation observed by astronomers during these events. However, a team led by Robert Quimby at the California Institute of Technology in the US has identified a batch of six supernovae with radiation properties that cannot be explained by any of the three mechanisms.

The first cause discounted by Quimby was radioactive decay. During the highly energetic explosion of a supernova the temperature skyrockets. This allows heavy elements, including 56Ni, to be synthesized. Their subsequent radioactive decay produces gamma-rays that slow down the rate at which the supernova fades away. Crucially, the explosions observed by Quimby were too short-lived. "These supernovae faded about three times as quickly as those driven by radioactive decay," he explains.
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New Solar System Formation Models Indicate That Jupiter's Foray Robbed Mars of Mass


Science Daily
Mon, 06 Jun 2011 16:24 UTC
Jupiter
© NASA/JPL/University of ArizonaTrue-color simulated view of Jupiter composed of four images taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Planetary scientists have long wondered why Mars is only about half the size and one-tenth the mass of Earth. As next-door neighbors in the inner solar system, probably formed about the same time, why isn't Mars more like Earth and Venus in size and mass? A paper published in the journal Nature provides the first cohesive explanation and, by doing so, reveals an unexpected twist in the early lives of Jupiter and Saturn as well.

Dr. Kevin Walsh, a research scientist at Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI®), led an international team performing simulations of the early solar system, demonstrating how an infant Jupiter may have migrated to within 1.5 astronomical units (AU, the distance from the Sun to Earth) of the Sun, stripping a lot of material from the region and essentially starving Mars of formation materials.

"If Jupiter had moved inwards from its birthplace down to 1.5 AU from the Sun, and then turned around when Saturn formed as other models suggest, eventually migrating outwards towards its current location, it would have truncated the distribution of solids in the inner solar system at about 1 AU and explained the small mass of Mars," says Walsh. "The problem was whether the inward and outward migration of Jupiter through the 2 to 4 AU region could be compatible with the existence of the asteroid belt today, in this same region. So, we started to do a huge number of simulations.
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Arrow Down

US: Boeing Issues Layoff Notices As NASA Retires Space Shuttle Program

Tiffany Kaiser
Daily Tech
Tue, 07 Jun 2011 09:59 UTC
Image
© DailyTech.com
About 510 employees in the Space Exploration division have received 60-day advance layoff notices

Now that the NASA Space Shuttle program is near completion, Boeing is announcing layoffs to employees in its Space Exploration division.

Since the beginning of this year, NASA has begun retiring the last functional orbiters in the Space Shuttle program. In February 2011, space shuttle Discovery made its final flight, and in May 2011, space shuttle Endeavor launched for the last time. With both missions being successful, NASA is now planning space shuttle Atlantis' final launch, which is scheduled for July 8.

With NASA slowly completing its Space Shuttle program, Boeing is issuing 60-day advance layoff notices to about 510 employees in the Space Exploration division. Those receiving layoff notices are about 260 employees in Houston, 150 employees at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and 100 employees at a company facility in Huntington Beach, California.
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