Science & TechnologyS


Star

Star Shooting Intense Water Jets Into Space Spotted By Herschel Telescope

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© NASA
A star shooting water is almost an oxymoron.

But a young sun-like star seems to have been spotted 750 light-years from Earth doing just that, as researchers have apparently discovered, according to PopSci. Their findings indicate that the proto-star is shoot water from its poles at about 124,000 miles per hour.

Essentially, it's creating water bullets that it shoots deep into interstellar space, according to National Geographic. This star is no more than 100,000 years old, and is located in the northern constellation Perseus.

The star was found by ESA's Herschel Space Observatory, which was able to see through a dense layer of gas that surrounded it. According to PopSci, the telescope picked up the light signature of both hydrogen and oxygen which are coming together as liquid water before vaporizing near the massive jets of gas that spew from the the star's poles.

Meteor

Asteroid Vesta: Surface of Huge Asteroid Has Mysterious Dark Spot

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© NASA/ReutersAsteroid Vesta in front of a background of stars, as seen on May 11. Vesta is 330 miles in diameter and the second most massive object in the asteroid belt. A mysterious dark spot has been found on its surface, but the asteroid is not yet in focus.
Asteroid Vesta has been coming into focus as NASA's Dawn probe comes in for close-up photos, but a mysterious dark spot has scientists scratching their heads.

A NASA spacecraft has captured new video of the huge asteroid Vesta ahead of a planned rendezvous with the space rock in July, revealing an odd, dark spot that has astronomers buzzing.

NASA's Dawn probe will arrive in orbit around Vesta, the second-largest asteroid in the solar system, on July 16. The spacecraft has been taking photos of Vesta with its framing camera since May to help prepare for the close encounter.

The new video is actually a series of 20 photographs taken during a 30-minute period on June 1, when Dawn was about 300,000 miles (483,000 kilometers) from the giant space rock. The images, which capture about 10 percent of a full rotation, reveal several intriguing features on the 330-mile-wide (530-km) Vesta. [Watch the new asteroid Vesta video]

Bizarro Earth

Tsunami lit up the heavens

Japan's recent monster earthquake did more than jolt the island nation and send a tsunami racing across the Pacific Ocean. Hundreds of kilometers overhead, that tsunami also lit up the atmosphere in celestial glowing ripples.
Tsunami lit the skies
© Jonathan Makela/Univ. of IllinoisIn this image taken by a camera in Hawaii, large-scale, glowing atmospheric ripples wash over the Hawaiian Islands (outlined in blue) following the March 11 Japan earthquake and tsunami. The red line is the tsunami’s location on the ocean surface.
In the first picture of its kind, scientists photographed these "airglow" ripples as they washed over Hawaii hours after the quake. The report will appear in an upcoming Geophysical Research Letters.

"It's just total serendipity that we got this measurement," says team leader Jonathan Makela, a space scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "It's a really neat example of how the environment is coupled together."

When the magnitude-9.0 quake ruptured the seafloor off eastern Japan on March 11, it displaced water that started rushing outward as a tsunami. Over the open ocean those waves were just centimeters high, but that small shift was enough to displace the air above the water's surface. The result: dense waves of atmospheric particles propagating upward.

Chalkboard

Best of the Web: Academic Authoritarians, Language, Metaphor, Animals, & Science

Authoritarians
A few years ago a group of researchers in Scotland studying learning in apes did some experiments (involving opening boxes to get a piece of candy inside) that showed that chimpanzees learn in a variety of "flexibly adaptive" ways, and that 3 year old children being presented with a similar task most often did it in ways that appear to be less intelligent than the apes. They "suggest that the difference in performance of chimpanzees and children may be due to a greater susceptibility of children to cultural conventions." (Horner and Whiten, 2005; Whiten, et al., 2004).

In my newsletter on puberty, I described some of the effects of foods and hormones on intelligence. Here, I want to consider the effects of culture on the way people learn and think. Culture, it seems, starts to make us stupid long before the metabolic problems appear.

For many years I described culture as the perceived limits of possibility, but people usually prefer to think of it as the learned rules of conduct in a society. In the late 1950s I was talking with a psychologist about the nature of "mental maps," and I said that I found my way around campus by reference to mental pictures of the locations of things, and he said that his method was to follow a series of rules, "go out the front door and turn left, turn left at the first corner, walk three blocks and turn right, ....up the stairs, turn right, fourth office on the left." He had been studying mental processes for about 40 years, so his claim made an impression on me.

Blackbox

Scientists record 'death rattle' of star hitting black hole

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© Mark Garlick, University of Warwick handoutArtist's impression of the aftermath of star being consumed by a massive black hole in a galaxy 3.8 billion light years away. It blasted jets of energy from the black hole, one of which pointed directly at our own galaxy, enabling scientists to study and reconstruct the cosmic drama.
In late March, NASA's Swift satellite picked up a blast of gamma rays screaming past Earth.

Astronomers rushed to take a closer look, using powerful telescopes from Hawaii to the Canary Islands to check out the high-energy jet coming from a distant galaxy in the constellation Draco.

They initially speculated a collapsing star created the blast. Now they report that it appears a star the size of the sun was shredded by a massive black hole. Its "death rattle" was a high-energy flash or jet pointed straight at the Earth.

"This is a very strange one," says Nicholas Law, at the University of Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, a member of the international team that describes the cosmic drama in two reports published Thursday by the journal Science.

Info

Humans Evolving Slower Than Expected

Human Genome
© LiveScience

Humans might be evolving slower than scientists had thought, according to a new analysis of the genomes of two families, but there is a huge variance between people.

The researchers, reporting their findings June 12 in the journal Nature Genetics, based their measurement of evolution speed on the number of new mutations that occur during one generation in each of the families. A slower mutation rate means we probably separated from chimpanzees evolutionarily longer ago than previously thought, the researchers say, adding that the finding may have medical implications, if some groups of people are more mutation-prone than others.

"This makes us think about what are the underlying mechanisms of these mutations, other than just a random process," said study researcher Philip Awadalla, of the University of Montreal in Canada. "Why are there differences in the rate or accumulation of mutations in individuals?"

The mutations rate seems to be highly variable, Awadalla said, and could be affected by aging and environmental exposure to toxins, among other factors.

Pumpkin

Scientists genetically engineer female 'Frankenstein' goats in male bodies to create 'human' breast milk

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© AlamyTransgender: Nanny goats are being born inside the bodies of billy goats as a result of a bizarre genetic engineering project in New Zealand
Genetic engineers are deliberately breeding transgender goats to see if their milk is similar to that produced by humans.

The goats being created are effectively a female trapped in a male's body, complete with the full male anatomy.

The company behind them wants to see if their milk contains the same proteins as human breast milk - with a view to one day possibly selling it in stores.

The goats have been christened 'goys', a mixture of 'girl' and 'boy' and 15 have been bred at the research facility in New Zealand.

Critics have however already called for the breeding programme to be closed down amid concerns the scientists are 'playing God'.

Comment: Twice in one week?!

Chinese Scientists Genetically Modify Dairy Cows to Produce Human Breast Milk

This is too much...





Telescope

Volcanic Lunar Eclipse June 15

On Wednesday night, June 15th, there's going to be a total lunar eclipse visible from every continent except North America. The Moon will spend 100 minutes fully engulfed in Earth's shadow, making this the longest lunar eclipse in nearly 11 years. Maximum coverage occurs on Wednesday night at 20:12 UT. [details] [animated map] [webcasts: #1, #2]

Exhaust from the erupting volcano in Chile could affect the appearance of the eclipse. For discussion, scroll past this picture of a similar eclipse in 2010:

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© Alan Dyer of Gleichen, Alberta; Dec. 21, 2010

Magic Wand

"Unique, one of a kind meteorite": Asteroids factories for building blocks of life

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© NASAAn asteroid's composition depends on what materials came together to form that particular asteroid, and only some contain organic molecules, a class of carbon-based chemicals that living things are largely made of.
Click here to listen to the interview with Chris Herd.

A meteorite found in B.C. contains evidence that asteroids are production sites for molecules such as amino acids that form the building blocks of life, a new study says.

"What we're saying is that amino acids are actually the result of the geology happening on the asteroid," said Chris Herd, the planetary geologist at the University of Alberta who led the study published Thursday in Science.

"It's like a little factory. It's taking even more primitive molecules that are coming in from space and doing them up a bit."

He added that the warmer temperatures in the asteroid and the presence of water and possibly certain minerals provide a better environment than interstellar space for certain chemical reactions. Those reactions are needed to produce organic molecules, a class of carbon-based chemicals that living things are largely made of.

Info

Scientists: 'Super' Wheat To Boost Food Security

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© Jupiter Images
Scientists say they're close to producing new "super varieties" of wheat that will resist a virulent fungus while boosting yields up to 15 percent, potentially easing a deadly threat to the world's food supply.

The research is part of a global drive to protect wheat crops from the Ug99 strain of stem rust. It will be presented next week at a conference in St. Paul that's part of the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, based at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., organizers said Thursday.

Scientists will also report that Ug99 variants are becoming increasingly virulent and are being carried by the winds beyond Uganda and other East African countries where they were first identified in 1999. Once infected with the deadly fungus, wheat plants become covered in reddish-brown blisters.

According to a news release issued by the initiative ahead of the symposium, the fungus has now spread across all of eastern and southern Africa, and it might just be a matter of time before it reaches India or Pakistan, and even Australia and the Americas.

"We are facing the prospect of a biological firestorm, but it's also clear that the research community has responded to the threat at top speed, and we are getting results in the form of new varieties that are resistant to rust and appealing to farmers," Ronnie Coffman, who heads the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project at Cornell, said in the release.