Science & TechnologyS


Laptop

Paramount First to Sell UltraViolet Movies Directly

Kevin Parrish
The Verge
Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:00 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Paramount is selling UltraViolet movies without forcing a hard copy purchase, but comes with strict limitations.

Following news that Amazon will sell codes for UltraViolet movies without forcing consumers to purchase physical discs, Paramount Pictures will be the first studio to offer digital movie purchases directly from its website. What does this mean for consumers? A movie or TV episode that can be played across multiple devices, not just one specific hardware set or operating system.

Or maybe not. The purpose of UltraViolet is to offer consumers one digital copy that can be accessed on Android and iOS mobile devices, desktops, notebooks, Blu-ray players and other compatible devices. Introduced in October 2011, select Blu-ray movies like The Smurfs and Green Lantern contained a code that essentially "unlocked" the digital version via UltraViolet. Consumers simply needed to create an UltraViolet account, enter the code, and bam! There's your movie in a virtual locker.
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Phoenix

Geothermal Test Will Pour Water into Volcano to Make Power

Jeff Barnard
USA Today
Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:00 UTC
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© The Associated Press/Ryan BrenneckeA test well is drilled for a geothermal project at Newberry volcano in 2010.
Geothermal energy developers plan to pump 24 million gallons of water into the side of a dormant volcano in central Oregon this summer to demonstrate technology they hope will give a boost to a green energy sector that has yet to live up to its promise.

They hope the water comes back to the surface fast enough and hot enough to create cheap, clean electricity that isn't dependent on sunny skies or stiff breezes - without shaking the earth and rattling the nerves of nearby residents.

Renewable energy has been held back by cheap natural gas, weak demand for power and lack of political concern over global warming. Efforts to use the earth's heat to generate power, known as geothermal energy, have been further hampered by technical problems and worries that tapping it can cause earthquakes.

Even so, the federal government, Google and other investors are interested enough to bet $43 million on the Oregon project.

They are helping AltaRock Energy of Seattle and Davenport Newberry Holdings of Stamford, Conn., demonstrate whether the next level in geothermal power development can work on the flanks of Newberry Volcano, about 20 miles south of Bend, Ore.
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Satellite

Is The Air Force's X-37B Space Plane Spying On A Chinese Satellite?


Huffington Post
Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:27 UTC
The X-37B
© BoeingThe X-37B is shown here after landing at 1:16 a.m. Pacific time on December 3, 2010, concluding its more than 220-day experimental test mission. It was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on April 22, 2010.
The U.S. Air Force's classified X-37B space plane should have returned to Earth in December.

But the top-secret unmanned spacecraft continues to glide along its unusually low orbit nearly one year after it was launched in March 2011, leading Spaceflight magazine to suggest the vehicle is spying on a Chinese spacelab called Tiangong-1, the BBC reports.

The X-37B, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), is a 29-foot solar-powered craft NASA has been developing since 1999. In that time, the vehicle has been launched twice, including the most recent mission from which it has yet to return.

According to the Air Force, the craft's purpose is to test "reusable spacecraft technologies for America's future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth."

Since the Air Force took over operations of the shuttle in 2006, the Pentagon has remained mute on the program's overall budget and plans, compelling amateur astronomers to keep an eye on its movements, The New York Times reported in May of 2010. They noticed the shuttle orbited over "global trouble spots" like Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea.
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Magnify

Science Rewrites Assumptions About Pre-Historic Animals

Ed Struzik
Calgary Herald
Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:00 UTC
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University of Alberta technician Clive Coy sometimes spends a year or more cleaning up newly-uncovered fossils.
Paleontologist Phil Currie was walking along the sandstone cliffs of the badlands in southern Alberta when he spotted something sticking out of the side of the hill.

It appeared to be the fossil of an ancient turtle. But as he began to clear away the sand, he could see that it was the skull of a dinosaur.

There is nothing extraordinary about finding fossils in Dinosaur Provincial Park. In fact, there is no better place to find the remains of these so-called "terrible lizards" that walked the earth for more than 165 million years.

But in the days that followed in that summer of 2010, Currie suspected he may have found something extraordinary indeed. This specimen appeared to be so rare and so exquisitely preserved that he instructed his students and colleagues to go slow with the excavation when he had to leave base camp for a few days.

"I just didn't want to miss out on this one," he recalls. "It's extremely rare to find a dinosaur such as this, and almost as rare to find one that is so complete. I wanted to be there to see what we had by the time we were done with it."

Currie likes to say that building a dinosaur from fossils found in sand or embedded in rock is both an art and a science. Having a skull and a nearly complete skeleton such as this one, which he plans to reveal to the public in a year or two, makes it relatively simple.
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Snowflake

US, Russia to Conduct Joint Antarctica Inspection


Agence France Presse
Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:00 UTC
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© AFP Photo/Philippe SiuberskiA village of tents, where scientist sleep, is seen in front of the Belgian Princess Elisabeth polar station in Usteinen, Antarctica in 2009.
The United States and Russia will jointly inspect foreign facilities in Antarctica to make sure environmental and other responsibilities under the 1959 Antarctica Treaty are being met, the State Department said Saturday.

A US-Russian team will travel to Antarctica January 23-28 to check foreign stations, installations and equipment, it said.

"The US-Russian team will review adherence by treaty parties to their obligations, including with respect to limiting environmental impacts, ensuring that Antarctica is used only for peaceful purposes and that parties honor the prohibition on measures of a military nature," it said.
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Info

Motor Made of DNA Runs on Tracks

Jesse Emspak
Discovery News
Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:11 UTC
DNA Motor
© Adrian Neal/Getty Images

DNA has been made into tiny robots and self-replicating machines. Now it's been made into a tiny motor.

A team at Kyoto University and the University of Oxford has used DNA as the building blocks for a motor that runs along tiny tracks. The tracks all have switches and the network is programmable -- just like a computer.

The DNA is manipulated with a technique called "DNA origami." Just like its paper counterpart, this method uses DNA to fold structures into two and three dimensions. The folding of the molecules is done via sequencing in such a way that the DNA naturally self-assembles into the desired shape. The tiny tracks were laid down on top of tiles, also made of DNA.

The DNA "motors" run along the tracks, and since you can program the way the tracks are laid down, the whole system can carry information the same way electrons do in a computer's circuits. Essentially it's a DNA-powered computer.
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Info

How Neutrons Might Escape Into Another Universe


Technology Review, MIT
Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:11 UTC
Universe Jump
© Technology Review, MIT

The idea that our universe is embedded in a broader multidimensional space has captured the imagination of scientists and the general population alike.

This notion is not entirely science fiction. According to some theories, our cosmos may exist in parallel with other universes in other sets of dimensions. Cosmologists call these universes braneworlds. And among that many prospects that this raises is the idea that things from our Universe might somehow end up in another.

A couple of years ago, Michael Sarrazin at the University of Namur in Belgium and a few others showed how matter might make the leap in the presence of large magnetic potentials. That provided a theoretical basis for real matter swapping.

Today, Sarrazin and a few pals say that our galaxy might produce a magnetic potential large enough to make this happen for real. If so, we ought to be able to observe matter leaping back and forth between universes in the lab. In fact, such observations might already have been made in certain experiments.

The experiments in question involve trapping ultracold neutrons in bottles at places like the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble, France, and the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. Ultracold neutrons move so slowly that it is possible to trap them using 'bottles' made of magnetic fields, ordinary matter and even gravity.
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Info

Oldest Dinosaur 'Nursery' Discovered

Charles Choi
Live Science
Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:00 UTC
Dino Nursery
© Artwork by Julius CsotonyiThis artist's interpretation shows 190-million-year-old nests, eggs, hatchlings and adults of the prosauropod dinosaur Massospondylus in Golden Gate Highlands National Park, South Africa. While the mother dinos likely were 20 feet (6 meters) long, while their eggs were only 2.3 - 2.7 inches (6 to 7 cm) wide.
Tiny prints from baby dinosaurs dot the oldest dino nesting site found to date, a 190-million-year-old nursery in South Africa, researchers said.

The hatchery and the baby footprints uncovered there are significant clues about the evolution of complex family behaviors in early dinosaurs, providing the oldest-known evidence that dinosaur hatchlings remained at nests long enough to at least double in size.

The newly unearthed clutches of eggs, many with embryos inside, belonged to the plant-eating dinosaur Massospondylus, a prosauropod, or predecessor of the largest animals to ever walk the Earth, long-necked sauropods such as Brachiosaurus.
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Chalkboard

'Electric Earth' Could Explain Planet's Rotation

Kate McAlpine
Science
Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:58 UTC
disk of iron monoxide
© Kenji OhtaUnder pressure. The disk of iron monoxide (FeO) inside the diamond anvil, connected to gold (Au) electrodes.
When it comes to Earth's rotation, you might think geophysicists have pretty much everything figured out. Not quite. In order to explain some variations in the way our planet spins, Earth's mantle - the layer of hot, softened rock that lies between the crust and core - must conduct electricity, an ability that the mantle as we know it shouldn't have. Now, a new study finds that iron monoxide, which makes up 9% of the mantle, actually does conduct electricity just like a metal, but only at temperatures and pressures found far beneath the surface.

Earth's spin isn't flawless. Geophysicists have discovered that the time it takes our planet to complete one rotation - the length of a day - fluctuates slightly over the course of months or years. They've also noticed extra swing in the predictable wobble of Earth's axis of rotation, like the swaying of a spinning top. The variations are probably caused by the solid iron inner core, liquid metal outer core, and rocky mantle rotating at slightly different rates. Friction helps bring them into line, and the magnetic field of the outer core can pull on the metal inner core. But to really fit the observations, the core should also exert its magnetic tug on the mantle, says Bruce Buffett, an earth scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study. This means that a layer of the mantle must be able to conduct electricity. But, he says, "the origin of the metallic layer remains an open question."
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Meteor

International Organization To Assess Earth Defense From Space Dangers

Jonathan Amos
BBC News
Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:40 UTC
asteroid/Earth
© NASA/JPL/JHUAPL
NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision path with our planet.

The effort is being led from the German space agency's (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, and had its kick-off meeting this week.

It will draw on expertise from across Europe, Russia and the US.

It's a major EU-funded initiative that will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory experiments and new modelling work, and then try to come to some definitive positions.

Industrial partners, which include the German, British and French divisions of the big Astrium space company, will consider the engineering architecture required to deflect one of these bodies out of our path.

Should we kick it, try to tug it, or even blast it off its trajectory?
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