Science & TechnologyS


Meteor

Comet Armageddon Detected in Nearby Star System

Ian O'Neill
Discovery News
Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:14 UTC
Image
© NASA/JPL/Cal-TechA nearby star system is currently going through hell, as hinted at by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Through its infrared eye, Spitzer has detected the dusty remains of comet impacts around the star Eta Corvi -- reminding us what it must have been like during the early evolution of our own solar system.
During our solar system's "Late Heavy Bombardment" (LHB) some four billion years ago, the inner planets were constantly peppered with massive comets impacting their surfaces. Earth would have been unrecognizable -- the planet's surface was a burning, molten mess; young atmosphere constantly punctuated by incoming cometary fragments.

Devoid of any eroding atmosphere, the moon's surface bears the scars of this epic cometary onslaught -- huge impact craters providing a reminder of how violent the "early years" of our solar system really was.

Despite the continuous cycle of cataclysmic impact events generating a hellish cauldron on Earth, the LHB has been linked with the genesis of life -- evidence points to a cometary source for the organic ingredients. Needless to say, the growing pains inflicted by the LHB on our planet is of huge importance to scientists.

Therefore, to spot the signs of similar cometary bombardments in other star systems would be pretty awesome. Not only would that help us understand the evolution of planetary systems orbiting other stars, it would provide a "time capsule" for us to have a glimpse of the early life of our own solar system. Of course, it would also give us an idea of how many other stars could be "ripe" for life (as we know it).

Now, scientists using observations by Spitzer have detected cometary Armageddon around Eta Corvi, a star some 50 light-years away in the constellation Corvus.
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Satellite

Russia Eyes Caves on Moon for Setting Up a Lunar Base

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Wed, 19 Oct 2011 10:30 UTC
For the time being, it appears NASA has set aside any ambitions to return to the Moon with human missions. But Russia may consider sending cosmonauts to the lunar surface to set up a colony using natural caves and possible volcanic tunnels as protection from the harsh lunar environment.

Image
© NASA/GSFC/Arizona State UniversitySpectacular high Sun view of the Mare Tranquillitatis pit crater revealing boulders on an otherwise smooth floor. Image is 400 meters wide, north is up, NAC M126710873R
Krikalev served on board two different space stations and flew on the space shuttle. He now leads Russia's Star City cosmonaut training center outside Moscow. He and Russian scientists discussed the possible Moon base a forum on the future of manned spaceflight.

The image above is from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing a cave or pit found in the Sea of Tranquility. Scientists have estimated the depth of the pit at over 100 meters, and several other caves have been found with orbiting spacecraft. Lunar scientists are studying the images to determine if an extended lava tube system still exists beneath the surface.
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Chess

Darpa Wants to Master the Science of Propaganda

Dawn Lim
Wired
Wed, 19 Oct 2011 09:24 UTC
Image
© Wikimedia CommonsStorytelling
Mark Twain once tried to distinguish between the storyteller's art and tales that a machine could generate. He observed that stringing "incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities," was the province of the American storyteller. A machine might imitate simple formulas behind yarns, but never quite master them.

The Pentagon's freewheeling research arm is hoping to prove Twain wrong. Darpa is asking scientists to "take narratives and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion." The idea is to detect terrorists who have been indoctrinated by propaganda. Then, the Pentagon can respond with some messages of its own.

The program is called "Narrative Networks." By understanding how stories have shaped your mind, the Pentagon hopes to sniff out who has fallen prey to dangerous ideas, a neuroscience researcher involved in the project tells Danger Room. With this knowledge, the military can also target groups vulnerable to terrorists' recruiting tactics with its own counter-messaging.
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Magnify

How humans make up for an 'inborn' vitamin C deficiency


Cell Press
Thu, 20 Mar 2008 06:02 UTC
Image
© Unknown
A new study appears to explain how humans, along with other higher primates, guinea pigs and fruit bats, get by with what some have called an "inborn metabolic error": an inability to produce vitamin C from glucose.

Unlike the more than 4,000 other species of mammals who manufacture vitamin C, and lots of it, the red blood cells of the handful of vitamin C-defective species are specially equipped to suck up the vitamin's oxidized form, so-called L-dehydroascorbic acid (DHA), the researchers report in the March21st issue of Cell, a publication of Cell Press. Once inside the blood cells, that DHA--which is immediately transformed back into ascorbic acid (a.k.a. vitamin C)--can be efficiently carried through the bloodstream to the rest of the body, the researchers suggest.

"Evolution is amazing. Even though people talk about this as an 'inborn error' - a metabolic defect that all humans have - there is also this incredible manner in which we've responded to the defect, using some of the body's most plentiful cells," said Naomi Taylor of Université Montpellier I and II in France, noting that the body harbors billions of red blood cells. "[Through evolution], we've created this system that takes out the oxidized form of vitamin C and transports the essential, antioxidant form."
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Bizarro Earth

Key to Mysterious Ocean Glow Proposed


OurAmazingPlanet
Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:47 UTC
Milk Sea
© Steven Miller, NRLThe "milk sea" in a composite satellite image, and the region of the ocean where it was spotted.

Scientists may have an explanation behind the rare nighttime events in which the ocean glows bright blue as far as the eye can see in all directions.

A new study details a process in plankton that would potentially account for this widespread bioluminescent phenomenon, which was confirmed by satellites in 2005 (see above image).

Scientists already knew that tiny, unicellular plankton called dinoflagellates create the distinctive blue flashes in some waters. How they flash their blue light was less clear.

A key aspect of the potential mechanism for bioluminescence in dinoflagellates involves voltage-gated proton channels - channels in membranes that can be opened or closed by chemical or electrical events.
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Info

Ancient Meteorite Blast Resembled Volcanic Eruption


OurAmazingPlanet
Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:36 UTC
Impact Ejecta
© Branney and Brown 2011 (Journal of Geology 199, 275-292)Meteorite impact ejecta (left) compared with volcanic deposits (right) showing closely similar structures made of dust particles. The top two photos show accretionary lapilli in density current deposits, whereas bottom two photos show pellets that formed when dust in the atmosphere clumped together and simply fell onto the land surface.

A billion years ago, a meteorite slammed into the Earth along the coast of what is now Scotland. A forensic investigation by a team of volcanologists has pieced together exactly how the debris from the impact devastated the surrounding region.

The new research shows that some aspects of giant meteorite impacts may mimic the behavior of large volcanic eruptions.

Meteorite impacts are more common than most people realize, but what happens when the meteorite hits? Direct observation is understandably difficult, but researchers can pick through impact debris that hasn't eroded away and then forensically reconstruct these catastrophic events.

The volcanologists say that an improved understanding of what happens when large objects hit the Earth will help us understand how such events affect life on the planet.
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Book

Computer program to reveal who wrote the Bible

Ted Thornhill
The Daily Mail
Fri, 14 Oct 2011 10:19 UTC
Precisely who wrote the Bible has been debated for centuries - but now scientists have devised a computer program that sheds much more light on the sources of the various religious texts within it.

Israeli computer scientists and Bible scholars have written an algorithm that analyses the writing styles found within various sections.

While it can't pinpoint an individual author, the program has been able to determine when a passage has been written by more than one person and can detect the point at which a new author has taken over.

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© Getty ImagesWrite stuff: The computer program searches for how common words are used throughout the scriptures
For instance, many believe that the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, was written by one person - Moses.
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Magic Wand

The Ice Age might still be going on inside China's deepest caves

Alasdair Wilkins
IO9
Sun, 09 Oct 2011 02:33 UTC
Image
© Permacultured on Flickr
Hidden in the dark caves of southwest China, a fragment of Earth's last Ice Age might well survive. Sadly, there aren't any mammoths hiding out in there, but tiny plants might represent a last link to 30,000 years ago.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Science and the UK's Natural History Museum have identified seven species of nettle from the Guangxi and Yunnan provinces that are completely unlike the tropical vegetation that dominates the region. The nettles are only found in the darkest corners of the provinces' caves and gorges, places where barely any sunlight ever shines. In fact, some of the nettles have to survive on only 0.02% of total available sunlight - you don't find that level of darkness anywhere outside the ocean depths.
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Bulb

The Original Human Language Like Yoda Sounded

Natalie Wolchover
Live Science
Thu, 13 Oct 2011 02:19 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Many linguists believe all human languages derived from a single tongue spoken in East Africa around 50,000 years ago. They've found clues scattered throughout the vocabularies and grammars of the world as to how that original "proto-human language" might have sounded. New research suggests that it sounded somewhat like the speech of Yoda, the tiny green Jedi from Star Wars.

There are various word orders used in the languages of the world. Some, like English, use subject-verb-object (SVO) ordering, as in the sentence "I like you." Others, such as Latin, use subject-object-verb (SOV) ordering, as in "I you like." In rare cases, OSV, OVS, VOS and VSO are used. In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Merritt Ruhlen and Murray Gell-Mann, co-directors of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages, argue that the original language used SOV ordering ("I you like").

"This language would have been spoken by a small East African population who seemingly invented fully modern language and then spread around the world, replacing everyone else," Ruhlen told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.
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Question

Fermi Finds 600 Gamma-Ray Mysteries in the Night Sky

Dauna Coulter
Science@NASA
Tue, 18 Oct 2011 01:02 UTC
NASA's Fermi team recently released the second catalog of gamma-ray sources detected by their satellite's Large Area Telescope (LAT). Of the 1873 sources found, nearly 600 are complete mysteries. No one knows what they are.

"Fermi sees gamma rays coming from directions in the sky where there are no obvious objects likely to produce gamma rays," says David Thompson, Fermi Deputy Project Scientist from Goddard Space Flight Center.

All Sky-Map
© NASAAn all-sky map of gamma-ray emissions made by the Fermi Space Telescope. Hundreds of the sources in the map are complete mysteries.
Gamma rays are by their very nature heralds of great energy and violence. They are a super-energetic form of light produced by sources such as black holes and massive exploding stars. Gamma-rays are so energetic that ordinary lenses and mirrors do not work. As a result, gamma-ray telescopes can't always get a sharp enough focus to determine exactly where the sources are.

For two thirds of the new catalog's sources the Fermi scientists can, with at least reasonable certainty, locate a known gamma ray-producing object*, such as a pulsar or blazar, in the vicinity the gamma-rays are coming from. But the remaining third - the "mystery sources" -- have the researchers stumped, at least for now. And they are the most tantalizing.
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