Science & TechnologyS


Meteor

410-meter asteroid may collide with Earth in 2032


RT
Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00 UTC
asteroid
© Reuters / NASA / JPL-Caltech / Handout
A potentially catastrophic asteroid has been discovered by astronomers, who say there's a slim chance that the 410-meter-wide minor planet will crash into Earth in 2032, creating a blast 50 times greater than the biggest nuclear bomb.

The asteroid, described as 2013 TV135, was found in the Camelopardalis (Giraffe) constellation by the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in southern Ukraine, the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomers Union said.

"On the night of October 12, I was watching the Giraffe constellation, it was an in-depth monitoring as part of the comet search program," Gennady Borisov from the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory told Itar-Tass news agency. "This is when the asteroid... was discovered. The first observations show that it moves quickly and is relatively close."

The discovery has been confirmed by astronomers in Italy, Spain, the UK and Russia. In Russia, it was seen with telescopes at the Master Observatory in the Siberian republic of Buryatia, the IAU Minor Planet Center said.

The asteroid has been added to the List of the Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, which includes celestial bodies with orbits closer than 7.5 million kilometers from the Earth's orbit.

However, the threat posed by 2013 TV135 is minor, as it only has a one in 63,000 chance of colliding with our planet, according to available estimates.

Astronomers say the asteroid's orbit will be about 1.7 million kilometers away from the Earth's orbit on August 26, 2032.

If the asteroid hits Earth, it would create an explosion equivalent to 2,500 megatons of TNT, which is 50 times greater than the biggest nuclear bomb ever detonated.
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Eye 1

How mobile phone accelerometers are used for keylogging


Hacker 10
Tue, 08 Oct 2013 13:22 UTC
Massachusets and Georgia Insititute of Technology researchers have developed a method to log computer keystrokes by placing a smartphone next to a computer keyboard and major its sound and vibration using the smartphone accelerometer. The researchers employed an iPhone 4 for this and noted that sensors in older models are not good enough to pick up remote vibrations.

Mobile devices accelerometers are used to re-orient your screen using a differential capacitor to measure changes in gravitational pull. Researchers used it to listen in to typing sounds and translate them into text by estimating volume and force produced during keystroking.

mobile phone accelerometer
© unknown
The phone was enginereed to interpret what dictionary words sounded like and translate them into text. Accuracy was next to 80% and it only went down after an extensive number of dictionary words were added. Since an attacker might now what kind of information they are after, a customised dictionary with likely terms can be built to increase accuracy.
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Saturn

Watery asteroid gobbled up by a white dwarf: implications for life in other solar systems

Lucyna Kedziora-Chudczer
The Conversation
Thu, 10 Oct 2013 22:21 UTC
water asteroid
© Mark A. Garlick, space-art.co.uk, University of Warwick and University of CambridgeRocky, water-rich asteroids and similar objects likely delivered the bulk of water on Earth. Now they’re being found well outside our Solar system.
How will future alien scientists know whether life existed in our solar system? One method may be to sift through the planetary debris left when our sun becomes a white dwarf. Astronomers are doing just that with a far-distant white dwarf, GD 61; in research they've published today in Science they point to an unusually high amount of oxygen among the debris, and discuss what that might mean for life outside our solar system.

White dwarfs' meals reveal past solar systems

In the very distant future our sun will run out of fuel and, after billions of years of spectacular evolution, it will turn into an extremely hot stellar remnant, a white dwarf. Almost half its current mass will be squeezed into a volume slightly bigger than the Earth.

Before reaching that stage the sun will gradually brighten and first become a red giant, with dire consequences for life on our planet.

Turbulent events in the final phases of solar evolution will obliterate our inner solar system, leaving behind only the giant planets and their numerous moons. If our star is merciful in this monstrous phase, then the asteroid belt might just survive as well. No guarantees.

Given all this cosmic devastation, would future astro-archaeologists even be able to recognise that life once thrived in this stellar system? Or would there be no memory of a long-gone rocky planet that once travelled in orbit around a much younger yellow star?
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Info

Were earliest humans all one species? Oddball skull sparks debate

Charles Q. Choi
LiveScience
Thu, 17 Oct 2013 13:01 UTC
Skull
© Georgian National MuseumThe 1.8-million-year-old skull unearthed in Dmanisi, Georgia, suggests the earliest members of the Homo genus belonged to the same species, say scientists in a paper published Oct. 18, 2013 in the journal Science.
The earliest, now-extinct human lineages, once thought to be multiple species, may actually have been one species, researchers now controversially suggest.

Modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the only living member of the human lineage, Homo, which is thought to have arisen in Africa about 2 million years ago at the beginning of the ice age, also referred to as the Pleistocene Epoch. Many extinct human species were thought to once roam the Earth, such as Homo habilis, suspected to be among the first stone-tool makers; the relatively larger-brained Homo rudolfensis; the relatively slender Homo ergaster; and Homo erectus, the first to regularly keep tools it made.

To learn more about the roots of the human family tree, scientists investigated a completely intact, approximately 1.8-million-year-old skull excavated from the medieval hilltop town of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia. Archaeological excavations there about 30 years ago unexpectedly revealed that Dmanisi is one of the oldest-known sites for ancient human species out of Africa and the most complete collection of Homo erectus skulls and jaws found so far. The world's largest, extinct cheetah species once lived in the area, and scientists cannot rule out whether it fed on these early humans.

This fossil, the most massively built skull ever found at Dmanisi, is the best-preserved fossil of an early human species discovered yet. It probably belonged to a male, and its right cheekbone has signs that it healed from a fracture.

"We can only guess how the fracture was inflicted on the individual - it could be that it had an argument with another member of the group it lived in, or it could be that it fell down," study co-author Christoph Zollikofer, a neurobiologist at the Anthropological Institute and Museum in Zurich, Switzerland, told LiveScience.
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Heart

Chimpanzees 'catch' yawns from humans

Nick Collins
The Telegraph, UK
Thu, 17 Oct 2013 14:48 UTC
Chimpanzees "catch" yawns from humans, scientists have discovered in one of the first examples of cross-species "yawn contagion".


Chimpanzees can "catch" yawns from humans as they grow older, according to scientists who say the behaviour is most likely an attempt to bond with their keepers.

'Contagious' yawning, which happens when one person's yawn sets off the same reaction in others, is thought to be a measure of empathy, or sharing others' emotions.

Humans are more likely to catch yawns from people they are close to, and the only previously documented example of contagion between humans and animals has been between dogs and their owners.

Now researchers from Lund University in Sweden have found that chimpanzees exhibit the same behaviour, according to a study in the PLOS ONE journal.

Like young human children, infant chimpanzees are unaffected by the yawning of others but pick up the habit at about the age of five, they concluded.
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Saturn

Saturn's bizarre HEXAGONAL storm system is revealed in true colour for the first time

Ellie Zolfagharifard
The Daily Mail, UK
Thu, 17 Oct 2013 12:30 UTC
  • Hexagon shape is created by a band of upper-atmospheric winds on Saturn
  • Images, up until now, have shown it in false-colour infrared wavelengths
  • In April, the Cassini spacecraft provided scientists with the first close-up views of a behemoth hurricane swirling within it
Image
Nasa's Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn for over nine years, has captured the northern hexagon in true colour
The mysterious six-sided storm on Saturn's North Pole has long captivated astronomers.

But up until now, images taken of it have been in infrared wavelengths, showing false-colour shades of red, orange and green.

Now Nasa's Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting the planet for over nine years, has captured the northern hexagon in its true, incredible colours.

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Igloo

Are you part iceman? Famous Ötzi has 19 living relatives

Tia Ghose
Live Science
Wed, 16 Oct 2013 22:28 UTC
otzi
A new genetic analysis reveals that Otzi the Iceman is most closely related to modern-day Sardinians
Ötzi the Iceman, a stunningly preserved mummy found in the Italian Alps in 1991, has living relatives in the region, new genetic analysis shows.

The study, published in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics, found that the 5,300-year-old mummy has at least 19 male relatives on his paternal side.

"We can say that the Iceman and those 19 must share a common ancestor, who may have lived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago," study co-author Walther Parson, a forensic scientist at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Innsbruck, Austria, wrote in an email. "In that sense, those 19 are closer related to the Iceman than other individuals. We usually think about our families when we talk about relatives. However, these data demonstrate that DNA can also be used to trace relatives much further back in time."
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Laptop

Online system may ID mental health disorders

C. E. Huggins
Reuters
Thu, 10 Oct 2013 19:44 UTC
An Internet-based system could be a useful tool for screening adults for mental health disorders and giving preliminary diagnoses, according to a new Dutch study.

This eDiagnostics system is already used in primary care practices in The Netherlands, the researchers say, but nowhere else, and more study is needed to determine if it is reliable, valid and cost-effective.

"Using the Internet to diagnose mental health problems in primary care seems very promising," writes lead author Ies Dijksman and colleagues from Maastricht University.

"The great advantage of an electronic system is that patients can complete diagnostic tests at home," Dijksman told Reuters Health in an email, adding that people may be quicker to reveal themselves over the Internet and provide genuine responses to questions because of their perceived anonymity.
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Info

Life after Death? New techniques halt dying process

Bahar Gholipour
LiveScience
Wed, 16 Oct 2013 15:39 UTC
Life after Death
© Shutterstock
New York - The line between life and death is not as clear as once thought, now that developments in the science of resuscitation have made it possible to revive people even hours after their heart has stopped beating and they are declared dead, medical experts say.

"Historically, when a person's heart stopped and they stopped breathing, for all intents and purposes, they were dead," said Dr. Sam Parnia, an assistant professor of critical care medicine at State University of New York at Stony Brook. "There was nothing you could do to change that," Parnia told an audience at the New York Academy of Sciences last week.

However, in the process of unraveling mysteries of death at the cellular level, scientists have learned that death does not occur in a single moment, but instead is a process. It is actually after a person has died -- by our current definition of death -- that the cells of the body start their own process of dying.

This process "could take hours of time, and we could potentially reverse that," Parnia said.
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Blackbox

U.S. Government shutdown prompts 'Accuracy' warning on USGS earthquake site

Yuriy Humber
BusinessWeek.com
Tue, 15 Oct 2013 16:35 UTC
Any drop in USGS activity would impact lesser developed nations such as the Philippines, which run smaller-scale monitoring and rely on the USGS for global earthquake data, Robert Geller, a professor of seismology at Tokyo University, said by phone. It would also affect ordinary citizens in the U.S, he said.

"If a big quake occurred now, hypothetically, inside the U.S., disaster relief work might be slowed down if USGS data wasn't available to the government," Geller said. The effect of the shutdown depends on whether the agency has curtailed the monitoring itself or stopped putting the data online, he said.

Earthquake Risk

Despite the warning, the National Earthquake Information Center of the USGS at Golden, Colorado, does not expect delays in earthquake monitoring and said data is being gathered at the same rate as before the shutdown. "At this point we are getting earthquakes posted on our website on time, within 20 minutes for magnitude 5 and larger worldwide, and earlier for a national event," Jana Pursley, a geophysicist at the center, said today in a phone interview.
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