Science & TechnologyS


Bizarro Earth

Weird shift of Earth's magnetic field explained

Nola Taylor Redd
SPACE.com
Wed, 09 Oct 2013 13:01 UTC
Earth's magnetic field_1
© ESA/AOES MedialabEarth's magnetic field is generated by interactions in its molten outer core. As the flowing iron generates electric currents, the electromagnetic field is constantly changing.
Earth's magnetic field shields the planet from charged particles streaming from the sun, keeping it from becoming a barren, Mars-like rock. For more than 300 years, scientists have recorded a westward-drifting feature in the field that models have been unable to explain.

By relying on insights gleaned from previous work, as well as data collected over nearly four centuries, an international team of scientists has been able to provide a model that accounts for the western drift of the magnetic field on one side of the planet.

"People have tried various configurations regarding the state of the core-mantle alignment," lead author Julien Aubert, of the Université Paris Diderot in France, told SPACE.com in an email."The ingredients were here, but they were never put in the right configuration, in particular for reproducing the geomagnetic westward drift."
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Satellite

Experts stumped by spacecraft's speed variations during Earth flyby

Elizabeth Howell
Universe Today
Wed, 09 Oct 2013 13:10 UTC
Juno
© NASAArtist’s conception of Juno coming near Earth on a planned flyby Oct. 9, 2013.
Every so often, engineers send a spacecraft in Earth's general direction to pick up a speed boost before heading elsewhere. But sometimes, something strange happens - the spacecraft's speed varies in an unexpected way. Even stranger, this variation happens only during some Earth flybys.

"We detected the flyby anomaly during Rosetta's first Earth visit in March 2005," stated Trevor Morley, a flight dynamics specialist at the European Space Agency's European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany.

"Frustratingly, no anomaly was seen during Rosetta's subsequent Earth flybys in 2007 and 2011. This is a real cosmic mystery that no one has yet figured out."
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Cell Phone

CMU researchers claim to have created messaging app even NSA can't crack

Jon Delano
CBS Pittsburgh
Tue, 08 Oct 2013 19:28 UTC
Image
© Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
Carnegie Mellon University researchers claim they have created a smartphone messaging app with security that not even the National Security Agency can break.

The app is called SafeSlinger, and is free on the iTunes store, and Google play store for Android phones.

Researchers say the app uses a passphrase which only the user, and the other party can know.They claim messages cannot be read by a cellular carrier, internet-provider, employer, or anyone else.

The setup takes a few minutes, with the user answering security questions generated by the app that help it generate encryption and authorization credentials.

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Robot

Soon, Drones may be able to make lethal decisions on their own

Joshua Foust
National Journal
Tue, 08 Oct 2013 16:49 UTC
NASA Global Hawk
© SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty ImagesA NASA Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone aircraft, takes off during a Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel, or HS3, mission at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia, on September 10, 2013
Scientists, engineers and policymakers are all figuring out ways drones can be used better and more smartly, more precise and less damaging to civilians, with longer range and better staying power. One method under development is by increasing autonomy on the drone itself.

Eventually, drones may have the technical ability to make even lethal decisions autonomously: to respond to a programmed set of inputs, select a target and fire their weapons without a human reviewing or checking the result. Yet the idea of the U.S. military deploying a lethal autonomous robot, or LAR, is sparking controversy. Though autonomy might address some of the current downsides of how drones are used, they introduce new downsides policymakers are only just learning to grapple with.
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Comet 2

Scientists discover ancient Earth comet impact

Lee Rannals
RedOrbit
Tue, 08 Oct 2013 15:21 UTC
Exploding Comet
© Terry Bakker An artist’s rendition of the comet exploding in Earth’s atmosphere above Egypt.
Comet ISON is getting closer to making its close pass by the sun, but what would happen if it had a brush with our planet instead? New evidence shows it would be devastating.

International scientists have discovered the first ever evidence of a comet entering Earth's atmosphere and exploding. This celestial object rained down fire across the Earth, obliterating every life form in its path.

The team's discovery provides the first definitive proof of a comet striking Earth millions of years ago. It also helps to give scientists a peak into how comets help shape the solar system.

"Comets always visit our skies - they're these dirty snowballs of ice mixed with dust - but never before in history has material from a comet ever been found on Earth," Professor David Block, of Wits University, said in a statement.
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Info

Go with your gut: How bacteria may affect mental health

Tanya Lewis
LiveScience
Tue, 08 Oct 2013 11:29 UTC
Gut Bacteria
© DreamstimeStudies in mice suggest that gut bacteria can influence anxiety and other mental states.
New York - The oodles of microbes living in the gut may affect brain function, recent studies suggest.

The human body is home to about 100 trillion bacteria - that means there are about 10 times as many bacterial cells as human cells in your body. Increasing evidence shows these microbes - collectively known as the microbiome - play a role in health, including mental health.

Studies in mice suggest that microbes living in the digestive tract are linked to depression and anxiety.

"There's a strong relationship between gastroenterology and psychiatric conditions," said gastroenterologist Dr. Stephen Collins of McMaster University in Canada, at a symposium here at the New York Academy of Sciences.

Many people with inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS) have depression or anxiety, Collins said. His research team has found several lines of evidence that intestinal microbes influence the brain.
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Wolf

Why dogs have feelings too

Mark Reynolds
The Express, UK
Tue, 08 Oct 2013 13:23 UTC
A man's best friend really does share his master's feelings.

Image
© GETTYFeeling blue: Dogs have emotions just like us
For the first time scientists have established that dogs have the ability to experience positive emotions, such as love and attachment.

The findings mean we may have to rethink the idea of pets as "property".

Dogs could have a level of emotional response comparable to that of a child, the results suggest.

Professor Gregory Berns, who revealed his findings in a New York Times article, carried out scans on his own dog's brain to achieve the results.

The professor, from Emory University, Atlanta, had to give his pet terrier Callie the scans without anaesthetic to keep her still.

So with the help of his friend, dog trainer Mark Spivak, he taught her to go into an MRI scanner he built in his living room, place her head in a custom-fitted chin rest then hold still for up to 30 seconds.After months of trial and error, he built up a series of MRI scans.
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2 + 2 = 4

NIH shutdown effects multiply

Erika Check Hayden
Nature
Wed, 02 Oct 2013 11:12 UTC
Image
© Rhoda Baer/National Eye InstituteMost NIH scientists have been ordered to stay home until the US government reopens.
Businesses and academic researchers among those affected by ongoing US government shutdown.

Tuesday 1 October should have been an exciting day for David Johnson. The biotech chief executive planned to withdraw some of the cash from a US$1.2-million small business grant that his firm, GigaGen in San Francisco, California, had been awarded just days before by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

But Johnson was not able to access the money, nor may he be able to until the deeply divided US Congress agrees on a plan to fund government operations for the fiscal year that began on 1 October. In the meantime, the US government has shut down - a dramatic development that is beginning to hamper and halt the work of academic and private-sector researchers, as well as scientists employed by federal agencies.

"The knock-on effects - undermining confidence in public funding of research and ceding scientific priority to other nations - are hugely deleterious," says Ian Holmes, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
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People

Unexpected genomic change through 400 years of French-Canadian history

William Raillant-Clark
University of Montreal
Tue, 08 Oct 2013 10:29 UTC
The unique genomic signature could serve as a research model for founding events.

This news release is available in French.

Researchers at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center and University of Montreal have discovered that the genomic signature inherited by today's 6 million French Canadians from the first 8,500 French settlers who colonized New France some 400 years ago has gone through an unparalleled change in human history, in a remarkably short timescale. This unique signature could serve as an ideal model to study the effect of demographic processes on human genetic diversity, including the identification of possibly damaging mutations associated with population-specific diseases.

Until now, changes in the relative proportion of rare mutations, that could be both detrimental and adaptive, had only been shown over relatively long timescales, by comparing African and European populations. According to Dr. Alan Hodgkinson, the co-first author of an article published online in PLOS Genetics recently and a postdoctoral fellow, "through this first in-depth genomic analysis of more than a hundred French Canadians, we have been surprised to find that in less than 20 generations, the distribution and relative proportion of rare, potentially damaging variants have changed more than we anticipated."
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Info

Three-parent embryos immoral and technique to make them is untested, unsafe

Rebecca Taylor
LifeNews
Mon, 07 Oct 2013 17:00 UTC
mtDNA
© LifeNews
In the last year there has been a push in both the United Kingdom and the United States for permission to create children with three genetic parents. This technique, often called mitochondrial replacement (MR), is presented as a simple switching out the mitochondria in the eggs of women with mitochondrial disease. We inherit all of our mitochondria from our mother, so a woman with mitochondrial disease cannot help but pass that onto her offspring.

In reality, the technique is far from simple. The nucleus of a donor egg is removed and replaced with the nucleus of the woman with mitochrondrial disease. This creates a genetically-engineered egg where the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in the cytoplasm of the egg is from the donor and the nuclear DNA, the chromosomes we all learned about in biology, is from the woman with the mitochondrial disease.

The embryos created with IVF using these genetically-engineered eggs have the nuclear DNA of a woman and a man, like all other embryos, but would also have the mitochondrial DNA of the woman who donated the egg. These children would have the genetic material from three individuals.

In addition, these genetically-engineered children, well at least the girls, could not help but pass this engineering onto their offspring. This is a modification that would affect generations.
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