Science & TechnologyS


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Chinese Archaeologists Find 3,000-Year-Old Fruit Seeds


Xinhua
Sun, 21 Nov 2010 12:21 UTC
Chinese archeologists have found an ancient fruit cellar containing well-preserved apricot and melon seeds from more than 3,000 years ago in today's Shaanxi Province.

The cellar was a rectangular pit about 105 cm long, 80 cm wide and 205 cm deep, said Dr. Sun Zhouyong, a researcher with the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archeology.

Sun and his colleagues found the pit in 2002, about 70 cm underground the Zhouyuan site, ruins of Western Zhou dynasty (1046-771 BC) 100 km from Xi'an. After eight years of research, they concluded it was a cellar used to preserve fruits for aristocrats.

In each corner of the pit, Sun and his colleagues found a little round hole. "We assume the cellar had something like a shade that was fixed on the four holes but had decayed over the years."

Inside the cellar the researcher could see, even with naked eye, huge piles of nuts and seeds.
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Family

Why the Rich Are No Good at Empathy ... They Don't Need to Be


The Daily Mail, UK
Wed, 24 Nov 2010 05:45 UTC
woman with child
© Getty Images
People who are rich have trouble recognising the emotions of others, a new study claims.

The university research has found that those who are poorer are better at gauging how someone feels because they need to rely on other people more often.

Scientists speculated that the rich performed worse in tests because they can solve their problems without relying on others. In other words, because of their wealth they are not as dependent on the people around them.

Whereas people who cannot afford to buy support services - such as childcare - have to rely on neighbours or relatives to watch their children while they attend work or run errands.

One experiment used volunteers who worked at a university. Some had graduated from college while others had not. Researchers used educational level as a proxy for social class.

In the U.S, where the study was carried out, the term 'upper class' often equates to how rich someone is, rather than the more complex notions of class that exist in Britain.
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Rocket

'Phantom Ray' robot warjet to ride atop NASA shuttle-carrier 747

Lewis Page
The Register
Tue, 23 Nov 2010 04:01 UTC
jumboweaponjet
© The RegisterBoth of these planes might be out of work fairly soon.
Go west, young autonomous low-observable weapons system

The "Phantom Ray" robot Stealth combat jet under development by US aerospace mammoth Boeing is ready to begin trials, according to the company.

The machine will now be flown to the military test centre, Edwards airforce base in California, mounted atop one of NASA's space-shuttle-carrying jumbo jets.

Boeing has brought the Phantom Ray to completion with its own money, building on earlier work done with government funding to produce the X-45 demonstrator craft. The X-45 was axed due to lukewarm interest from the US Air Force and for some time nothing happened to it: but then Boeing decided that it would be fatal to be left behind in the race to produce a full-fat robot warplane (as opposed to less-capable propellor powered offerings such as the well-known Predator and Reaper).

Thus the massive company has now brought out the Phantom Ray to contend against such rivals as the X-47 being produced by Northrop for the US Navy or the Avenger from General Atomics. Having undergone basic taxi tests at Boeing's St Louis fighter factory, the robojet will now be fixed atop one of NASA's pair of Shuttle-hauling jumbos for the trip to California. Once at Edwards, there will be high-speed taxiing tests and then a first flight next year.
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Light Saber

Hacker Builds Floating Jedi-Training Remote Droid


Charlie Sorrel
Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:42 UTC
floatingglobe
© TheWired
Scofflaw YouTuber and opportunistic hardware hacker Troopertrent has made his own gravity-defying spaceball. To be precise, he made a floating replica of the Jedi Training Remote from Star Wars, the one that fires laser bolts for Luke to intercept when first aboard the Millennium Falcon.

The model, as you can see in the screen-grab above*, is an almost perfect replica of the remote, although a little smaller, and a little less hostile. How is it done? Magnets. Troopertrent took one of those tacky floating-ball executive toys in which a globe is suspended, dangling free in a magnetic field. Taking care not to add too much weight, he grafted on various plastic nodules and nubbins, gave the thing a lick of paint and re-floated it.
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Sun

The Sun Steals Comets from Other Stars

Dauna Coulter
NASA Science
Tue, 23 Nov 2010 23:14 UTC
The next time you thrill at the sight of a comet blazing across the night sky, consider this: it's a stolen pleasure. You're enjoying the spectacle at the expense of a distant star.

Orion Nebula
© NASAA cluster of stars forming in the Orion nebula. According to Hal Levison's research, these stars could be swapping comets.
Sophisticated computer simulations run by researchers at the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) have exposed the crime.

"If the results are right, our Sun snatched comets from neighboring stars' back yards," says SWRI scientist Hal Levison. And he believes this kind of thievery accounts for most of the comets in the Oort Cloud at the edge of our solar system.

"We know that stars form in clusters. The Sun was born within a huge community of other stars that formed in the same gas cloud. In that birth cluster, the stars were close enough together to pull comets away from each other via gravity. It's like neighborhood children playing in each others' back yards. It's hard to imagine it not happening."

According to this "thief" model, comets accompanied the nearest star when the birth cluster blew apart. The Sun made off with quite a treasure - the Oort Cloud, which was swarming with comets from all over the "neighborhood."

The Oort cloud is an immense cloud of comets orbiting the Sun far beyond Pluto. It is named after mid-20th century Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who first proposed such a cloud to explain the origin of comets sometimes seen falling into the inner solar system. Although no confirmed direct observations of the Oort cloud have been made, most astronomers believe that it is the source of all long-period and Halley-type comets.
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Question

Serpent Science: DARPA Wants to Know Flying Snakes' Secret

Clay Dillow
Popsci
Tue, 23 Nov 2010 11:35 UTC
Flying Snake
© Jake SochaChrysopelea paradisi
From ancient dragon mythology to the lesser offerings from Samuel L. Jackson's body of work, mankind has long shown an apprehension toward - one might even say a phobia of - airborne snakes. Perhaps it's the ability of these flying reptiles to strike fear into even the steeliest of human hearts that has the Pentagon interested in just exactly how these snakes perform their aerial acrobatics.

The snakes - which hail from Southeast Asia and India mostly and are of the Chrysopelea genus - are the subject of intense study by Virginia Tech researcher John Socha, but for a biologist he has an interesting backer in DARPA, the DoD's blue-sky research arm. DARPA naturally is tight-lipped about its interest in flying snakes, but its dollars are helping Socha create 3-D reconstructions of the biology and physics involved, research that is being published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biometrics.

How do the snakes do it? The don't really fly, per se, but rather fall with purpose. The snakes climb to the tops of the tallest trees, some 200 feet in the air, and then take a leap. But their method for turning their elongated forms into aerodynamic vehicles is pretty amazing, allowing them to travel nearly 800 feet laterally as they descend. They do this by first falling to pick up speed, then by initiating a strange aerial dance that essentially turns their bodies into one long wing. Some of them can actually pull off a turn in the air.
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Science devises new method to sort Dead Sea Scrolls

Jean-Baptiste Piggin
M & C News
Tue, 23 Nov 2010 07:01 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Berlin - Physicists are on the verge of more breakthrough discoveries about the Dead Sea Scrolls, a stock of 2,000-year-old religious documents found in the West Bank desert, a Berlin science institute says.

From 1947 to 1956, an estimated 900 distinct documents were recovered by Bedouins and archaeologists from 11 caves near Qumran, a ruined settlement at the north-west corner of the Dead Sea.
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Chart Pie

US scientists significantly more likely to publish fake research


Physorg.com
Tue, 23 Nov 2010 06:57 UTC
Image
US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, finds a trawl of officially withdrawn (retracted) studies, published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Fraudsters are also more likely to be "repeat offenders," the study shows.

The study author searched the PubMed database for every scientific research paper that had been withdrawn - and therefore officially expunged from the public record - between 2000 and 2010.

A total of 788 papers had been retracted during this period. Around three quarters of these papers had been withdrawn because of a serious error (545); the rest of the retractions were attributed to fraud (data fabrication or falsification).

The highest number of retracted papers were written by US first authors (260), accounting for a third of the total. One in three of these was attributed to fraud.

Comment: And this is not even the tip of the iceberg, see for instance Widespread Ghostwriting of Drug Trials Means "Scientific" Credibility of Pharmaceutical Industry is a Sham.

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Question

Plumes On Jupiter


Space Weather
Tue, 23 Nov 2010 02:23 UTC
Astronomers are monitoring a cluster of energetic plumes breaking through the cloudtops of Jupiter. Regard the image below. Each of the bright spots is a massive convection cell rising high above the usual cloud deck:

Plumes on Jupiter
© Anthony Wesley
Australian astrophotographer Anthony Wesley took the picture on Nov. 17th using a 16-inch telescope and a 890 nm "methane band" filter. Jupiter's atmosphere is permeated with methane, CH4, a strong absorber of sunlight at 890 nm. That's why the giant planet looks so dark in Wesley's image. The only things bright in the methane band are high-rising hazes and plumes that reflect sunlight before it enters the planet's methane-dark interior.
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Telescope

Orange Versus Blue Moon


Space Weather
Mon, 22 Nov 2010 21:47 UTC
By some reckonings, last night's full Moon was a Blue Moon. The moonrise over Korinthos, Greece however, had a distinctly different hue:

Image
© Konstantinos Christodoulopoulos
"The orange Moon rising over the Saronic Gulf near Korintthos was a beautiful sight," says Konstantinos Christodoulopoulos, who took the picture using a Canon EOS 450D.

Blue Moons are creatures of folklore, having little to do with actual color. A true-blue moon is a rare sight indeed. Orange moons, on the other hand, are commonplace. Scattering of moonlight by aerosols and air molecules gives the moon an orange tint via the same physics that colors sunsets.

So, actually, that was an ordinary moonrise over Greece. Not bad. Browse the links below for more "ordinary" moons from the weekend of Nov. 20-21.
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