Science & TechnologyS


Meteor

Space Ball Drops on Namibia: NASA, ESA to Investigate Crash

Steve Smith
International Business Times
Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:56 UTC
mysterious
© AFP, Getty ImagesNASA and the ESA will investigate the mysterious "space ball" from Namibia, which crashed into one of the country African villages in November. The ball is likely a NASA-made COPV sphere.
In mid-November, a hollow space ball fell from the sky and crashed into the earth in Namibia, the African nation situated above South Africa and west of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Authorities recovered the extraterrestrial sphere in a grassy village north of Windhoek, the country's capital.

The hollow ball, which appears to be made of "two halves welded together," has a rough surface, a 14-inch diameter and measures 43 inches around. The strange globe created a crater 13 inches deep and almost 12.5 feet wide, but was found almost 60 feet from the landing spot. Paul Ludik, the police forensics director investigating the case, says the dense ball weighs 13 pounds and is made of a "metal alloy known to man."

"It is not an explosive device, but rather hollow," said police deputy inspector general Vilho Hifindaka. "We had to investigate all this first."

Hifindaka are still stumped as to what the object is and where it came from. NASA and the European Space Agency will reportedly help investigate the strange occurrence.

Local eyewitnesses said they heard a series of booming explosions a few days before the ball was discovered. Authorities say that this phenomenon, while mysterious, is nothing new. Space balls of this nature have been found over the last few decades in countries in Central America and in Australia.
Read More...
Attention

Russian Satellite crashes into Siberia minutes after launch


ABC News
Sat, 24 Dec 2011 08:33 UTC
Meridian satellite rocket
© AFP/File, StrThe rocket's fragments crashed into the Novosibirsk region of central Siberia
A Russian satellite has crashed into Siberia minutes after its launch, the defence ministry says, in the latest humiliating setback for Russia's embattled space program.

The Meridian communications satellite failed to reach orbit after it was launched due to a failure with its Soyuz rocket, raising new concerns over the Russian space program which has now lost over half a dozen satellites in the last year.

Its fragments crashed into the Novosibirsk region of central Siberia and were found in the Ordynsk district around 100 kilometres south of the regional capital Novosibirsk.

"A sphere was found, around 50 centimetres in diameter, which crashed into the roof of a house in the village of Vagaitsevo," a local security official told the Interfax news agency.

In an extraordinary irony, the official said that the house was located on Cosmonaut Street, named after the heroic spacemen of the Soviet and Russian space program.
Read More...
Attention

Killer-Flu Debate: Should Mutant H5N1 Have Been Created?

Wynne Parry
Live Science
Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:11 UTC
Bird Flu
© Live ScienceControversial new research found a way to make bird flu spread easily among mammals.

News of two separate research projects that altered the bird-flu virus so it could potentially spread between humans has some experts asking: Should this research have been done at all?

Other scientists, however, are defending the projects as important progress in understanding how the virus, called H5N1, could adapt to cause a devastating pandemic.

"I wouldn't do it," said W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. "I think it is one thing to study the pathology of an organism to try to understand ways in which you can reduce the risk to humankind or animals by doing basic research. ... This isn't the case [here]; this virus doesn't transmit readily to humans."

Others argue that the two projects addressed questions crucial to averting a global tragedy: Could H5N1 mutate into a form that could spread between humans? And, if so, how?

"The bottom line is science has been advanced by this, we know something about the virus that we didn't know before," Thomas Daniels, an associate research scientist and co-director of the Vector Ecology Laboratory at Fordham University, told LiveScience. "It could be it's going to be very, very useful down the road, but right now we have to proceed with caution."
Read More...
Gift

A New Kind Of Metal In The Deep Earth


Before It's News
Fri, 23 Dec 2011 05:33 UTC
New Metal discovered
© Carnegie Institution
The crushing pressures and intense temperatures in Earth's deep interior squeeze atoms and electrons so closely together that they interact very differently. With depth materials change.

New experiments and supercomputer computations discovered that iron oxide undergoes a new kind of transition under deep Earth conditions. Iron oxide, FeO, is a component of the second most abundant mineral at Earth's lower mantle, ferropericlase. The finding, published in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters, could alter our understanding of deep Earth dynamics and the behavior of the protective magnetic field, which shields our planet from harmful cosmic rays.

Ferropericlase contains both magnesium and iron oxide. To imitate the extreme conditions in the lab, the team including coauthor Ronald Cohen of Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory, studied the electrical conductivity of iron oxide to pressures and temperatures up to 1.4 million times atmospheric pressure and 4000°F - on par with conditions at the core-mantle boundary. They also used a new computational method that uses only fundamental physics to model the complex many-body interactions among electrons. The theory and experiments both predict a new kind of metallization in FeO.

Compounds typically undergo structural, chemical, electronic, and other changes under these extremes. Contrary to previous thought, the iron oxide went from an insulating (non-electrical conducting) state to become a highly conducting metal at 690,000 atmospheres and 3000°F, but without a change to its structure. Previous studies had assumed that metallization in FeO was associated with a change in its crystal structure. This result means that iron oxide can be both an insulator and a metal depending on temperature and pressure conditions.
Read More...
Info

Are Pigeons as Smart as Monkeys?

Joseph Castro
Live Science
Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:07 UTC
Smart Pigeon
© William van der VlietPigeons trained to count to three can work out numerical rules to help them count up to nine. This pigeon orders the two images by first selecting the image with fewer squares.

Pigeons may not be so bird-brained after all, as scientists have found the birds' ability to understand numbers is on par with that of primates.

Previous studies have shown that various animals, from honeybees to chimpanzees, can learn to count when trained with food rewards. In 1998, researchers discovered that rhesus monkeys can not only learn to count to four, but can also pick up on numerical rules and apply them to numbers they haven't seen before, allowing them to count up to nine without further training.

With this finding in mind, psychologists at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, sought to find out if pigeons - another animal shown to count - have a numerical competence similar to rhesus monkeys.

"Pigeons are the perfect subjects for visual tasks, because their vision is really good and they're really easy to train," said psychologist Damian Scarf, first author of the new study. "It appears that you can train them on almost any task you can train monkeys on."
Read More...
Chalkboard

Aesop's Crows Understand Physics, Literature

Elizabeth Presto
Inkfish
Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:07 UTC
intelligent crows
© Unknown
Aesop told the fable of a thirsty crow that came upon a nearly empty pitcher of water and discovered that by dropping pebbles in, he could raise the water to a drinkable level. The moral is "Little by little does the trick"--or was that "Necessity is the mother of invention"? Either way, scientists have enjoyed testing non-fictional members of the clever corvid family with this puzzle. Most recently, wild crows showed scientists they're smart enough for a whole barrage of Aesop-inspired challenges.

New Zealand psychologist Alex Taylor led the study of five New Caledonian crows that had been captured from the wild. The birds (Caesar, Laura, Bess, Mimic and Pepe, since you asked) were each given an extensive series of tests while visually separated from their peers. Like one of those computer games where you walk into a dead-end room and have to find the secret button that opens a submarine hatch and takes you someplace more interesting, the crows were presented with varied apparatuses and had to figure out which objects were tools that would help get a tasty treat into their beaks.
Read More...
Satellite

DARPA's New Spy Satellite Could Provide Real-Time Video from Anywhere on Earth

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:46 UTC
Membrane Optical Imager for Real-Time Exploitation
© DARPAArtist concept of the Membrane Optical Imager for Real-Time Exploitation (MOIRE).
"It sees you when you're sleeping and knows when you're awake" could be the theme song for a new spy satellite being developed by DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's latest proof-of-concept project is called the Membrane Optical Imager for Real-Time Exploitation (MOIRE), and would provide real-time images and video of any place on Earth at any time - a capability that, so far, only exists in the realm of movies and science fiction. The details of this huge eye-in-the-sky look like something right out of science fiction, as well, and it would be interesting to determine if it could have applications for astronomy as well.

MOIRE would be a geosynchronous orbital system that uses a huge but lightweight membrane optic. A 20-meter-wide membrane "eye" would be etched with a diffractive pattern, according to DARPA, which would focus light on a sensor. Reportedly it will cost $500 million USD for each space-based telescope, and it would be able to image an area greater than 100 x 100 km with a video update rate of at least one frame a second.
Read More...
Info

Atomic Refrigerators Could Create Coolest Things Ever

Charles Choi
Live Science
Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:05 UTC
Thermometer
© Michelangelus | ShutterstockPhysicists reveal a new way to create ultra-cold matter, reaching temperatures 10-to-100-times colder than currently achieved.

The coolest things of the future might be created using what are essentially refrigerators that work on the atomic level, researchers say.

The level of control over matter that scientists are now developing to create ultra-cold objects could also be used to create entirely new states of matter and super-powerful quantum computers, researchers added.

Scientists routinely cool matter to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero, the coldest temperature theoretically possible, which corresponds to minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-273.15 Celsius). Still, they would like to chill matter to even-colder temperatures to better understand other extreme phenomena, such as superconductivity, where electrons zip without resistance through objects.

Now physicists reveal a new way to create ultra-cold matter, with an idea similar to how fridges work. Refrigerators pump a fluid known as a refrigerant around the area they are cooling. This fluid sucks up heat. The refrigerant is then pumped someplace where it dumps this heat.
Read More...
Info

Baby-Mother Bonds Affect Future Adult Relationships, Study Finds

Maureen Salamon
MyHealthNewsDaily
Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:08 UTC
Baby with Mum
© MyHealthNewsDaily

A mother lode of bonding - or a lack thereof - between moms and young children can predict kids' behavior in romantic relationships decades later, a new study suggests.

Adding to evidence that even preverbal memories are firmly imprinted on young psyches, researchers found that children who had been more securely attached to their mothers, now grown, did better at resolving relationship conflicts, recovering from those conflicts and enjoying stable, satisfying ties with their romantic partners in early adulthood.

"It's often very difficult to find the lingering effects of early life being related to adult behavior, because life circumstances change," said study author Jeffry A. Simpson, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. "People change, but there's a kernel of stability from early experience in a lot of people."

Simpson and his colleagues reviewed data from 75 children born in 1976 and 1977 as part of the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation, whose mothers received free prenatal care. These firstborn children were assessed at regular intervals with interviews, questionnaires, teachers' and parents' ratings and other observations, culminating with their relationships with their romantic partners at ages 20 and 21.
Read More...
Blackbox

Cloud suicide will wake black hole sleeping giant

Stephen Battersby
NewScientist
Tue, 20 Dec 2011 06:31 UTC
Image
© ESO/MPE/Marc SchartmannThe suicidal gas cloud is due to break up in 2013
The sleeping giant at the centre of the Milky Way is about to wake up. A suicidal gas cloud is heading towards the galaxy's supermassive black hole, which will probably swallow the cloud, generating enormous flares of radiation that could help explain why the black hole is normally so placid.

The doomed cloud was a surprise to astronomers. "We have been looking at the galactic centre for 20 years, but mainly to observe the motion of stars," says Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany.

Genzel's colleague Stefan Gillessen spotted the cloud in images from the Very Large Telescope array in Chile, taken in March this year. It is an unusually dense cloud, not much bigger than our solar system and carrying about three times the mass of Earth.
Read More...