Science & TechnologyS


Bad Guys

Science in Turmoil - Are We Funding Fraud?

There can be little doubt in the minds of those who are involved in attempting to disseminate research results among the entire scientific community that major problems exist. It is well documented that adopting certain stances will result in an inability to publish in the majority of the so-called high impact academic journals.

There are also well documented cases of people experiencing grave difficulties in their place of work and even, on some occasions, being driven out. Amazingly, there are even cases of attempts being made - some successful - to deny research students their doctorates because their theses contain material which may cause embarrassment for some person with an inflated sense of his/her own importance. Again, more and more academics, certainly in British universities, are coming under increasing pressure to draw funds into their establishments. Note the emphasis is not on good research, or even just research, but rather on attracting more and more money.

Calculator

Scientists See Numbers Inside People's Heads

By carefully analyzing brain activity, scientists can tell what number a person has just seen, research now reveals.

They can similarly tell how many dots a person was presented with.

Past investigations had uncovered brain cells in monkeys that were linked with numbers. Although scientists had found brain regions linked with numerical tasks in humans - the frontal and parietal lobes, to be exact - until now patterns of brain activity linked with specific numbers had proven elusive.

Scientists had 10 volunteers watch either numerals or dots on a screen while a part of their brain known as the intraparietal cortex was scanned - it's a region of the parietal lobe especially linked with numbers. They next rigorously analyzed brain activity to decipher which patterns might be linked with the numbers the volunteers had observed.

When it came to small numbers of dots, the researchers found that brain activity patterns changed gradually in a way that reflected the ordered nature of the numbers. For example, one might be able to conclude that the pattern for six is between that for five and seven.

Better Earth

Widespread water may cling to moon's surface

Image
© University of Maryland/F. Merlin/McRELProtons carried by the solar wind could be responsible for creating water molecules across the lunar surface
A large portion of the moon's surface may be covered with water. That is the surprising finding of a trio of spacecraft that have turned up evidence of trace amounts of the substance in the lunar soil.

Many scientists suspect water ice might lurk in permanently shadowed craters at the moon's poles, which play host to some of the coldest known regions in the solar system.

But new findings suggest that a small amount of water clings to lunar soil across the moon's surface. The first detection was made by India's Chandrayaan-1 probe. The spacecraft, which failed in August after less than 10 months in orbit, was the first lunar orbiter to carry an instrument capable of measuring how much light is absorbed by water-bearing minerals.

"There's nothing else it could be," says Carle Pieters of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, leader of the Chandrayaan-1 instrument team that made the detection.

Meteor

Asteroid attack: Putting Earth's defences to the test

It looks inconsequential enough, the faint little spot moving leisurely across the sky. The mountain-top telescope that just detected it is taking it very seriously, though. It is an asteroid, one never seen before. Rapid-survey telescopes discover thousands of asteroids every year, but there's something very particular about this one. The telescope's software decides to wake several human astronomers with a text message they hoped they would never receive. The asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. It is the size of a skyscraper and it's big enough to raze a city to the ground. Oh, and it will be here in three days.


Comment: For a more in-depth study, read Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls


Telescope

Scientists See Water Ice In Fresh Meteorite Craters On Mars

mars crater ice
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of ArizonaEarlier and later HiRISE images of a fresh meteorite crater 12 meters, or 40 feet, across located within Arcadia Planitia on Mars show how water ice excavated at the crater faded with time. The images, each 35 meters, or 115 feet across, were taken in November 2008 and January 2009.
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed frozen water hiding just below the surface of mid-latitude Mars. The spacecraft's observations were obtained from orbit after meteorites excavated fresh craters on the Red Planet.

Scientists controlling instruments on the orbiter found bright ice exposed at five Martian sites with new craters that range in depth from approximately half a meter to 2.5 meters (1.5 feet to 8 feet). The craters did not exist in earlier images of the same sites. Some of the craters show a thin layer of bright ice atop darker underlying material. The bright patches darkened in the weeks following initial observations, as the freshly exposed ice vaporized into the thin Martian atmosphere. One of the new craters had a bright patch of material large enough for one of the orbiter's instruments to confirm it is water-ice.

Life Preserver

India's lunar mission finds evidence of water on the Moon

moon
Dreams of establishing a manned Moon base could become reality within two decades after India's first lunar mission found evidence of large quantities of water on its surface.

Data from Chandrayaan-1 also suggests that water is still being formed on the Moon. Scientists said the breakthrough - to be announced by Nasa at a press conference today - would change the face of lunar exploration.

The discovery is a significant boost for India in its space race against China. Dr Mylswamy Annadurai, the mission's project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation in Bangalore, said: "It's very satisfying."

Telescope

NASA Goddard Shoots the Moon to Track LRO

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© Tom Zagwodzki/Goddard Space Flight Center Goddard's Laser Ranging Facility directing a laser (green beam) toward the LRO spacecraft in orbit around the moon (white disk). The moon has been deliberately over-exposed to show the laser
On certain nights, an arresting green line pierces the sky above NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It's a laser directed at the moon, visible when the air is humid. No, we're not repelling an invasion. Instead, we're tracking our own spacecraft.

28 times per second, engineers at NASA Goddard fire a laser that travels about 250,000 miles to hit the minivan-sized Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft moving at nearly 3,600 miles per hour as it orbits the moon.

Bell

British fortune hunter finds largest Anglo-Saxon treasure trove

anglo-saxon treasure
© Jeff Belmonte
An amateur treasure hunter has stumbled across the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever found buried in a Staffordshire field in central England, local media said on Thursday.

Terry Herbert from the town of Burntwood, who lives on disablement benefit, discovered the haul with his metal detector on farmland belonging to a friend. The 1,500 pieces made of gold and silver date back to the 7th century and comprise 5 kg of gold and 2.5 kg of silver.

"I have this phrase that I say sometimes; "spirits of yesteryear take me where the coins appear", but on that day I changed coins to gold," Herbert was quoted on the Telegraph website as saying. "I don't know why I said it that day, but I think somebody was listening and directed me to it."

Magnify

Genomic Research Shows Indians Descended from Two Groups

Map
© D. Reich, K. Thangaraj, N. Patterson, A. Price and L. SinghA map showing the groups across India included in the Nature study.
In a study published in the September 24th issue of Nature, an international team describes how they harnessed modern genomic technology to explore the ancient history of India, the world's second most populous nation.

The new research reveals that nearly all Indians carry genomic contributions from two distinct ancestral populations. Following this ancient mixture, many groups experienced periods of genetic isolation from each other for thousands of years. The study, which has medical implications for people of Indian descent, was led by scientists at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, India together with US researchers at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

"This work is an outstanding example of the power of international collaboration," said Lalji Singh, senior author of the Nature paper, who is a Bhatnagar Fellow and the former director of CCMB. "Scientists in India and the United States have together made discoveries that would have been impossible for either group working alone."

Fish

Mutations Make Evolution Irreversible: By Resurrecting Ancient Proteins, Researchers Find That Evolution Can Only Go Forward

Fish
© iStockphotoFish fossil.
A University of Oregon research team has found that evolution can never go backwards, because the paths to the genes once present in our ancestors are forever blocked. The findings -- the result of the first rigorous study of reverse evolution at the molecular level -- appear in the Sept. 24 issue of Nature.

The team used computational reconstruction of ancestral gene sequences, DNA synthesis, protein engineering and X-ray crystallography to resurrect and manipulate the gene for a key hormone receptor as it existed in our earliest vertebrate ancestors more than 400 million years ago. They found that over a rapid period of time, five random mutations made subtle modifications in the protein's structure that were utterly incompatible with the receptor's primordial form.

The discovery of evolutionary bridge burning implies that today's versions of life on Earth may be neither ideal nor inevitable, said Joe Thornton, a professor in the UO's Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

"Evolutionary biologists have long been fascinated by whether evolution can go backwards," Thornton said, "but the issue has remained unresolved because we seldom know exactly what features our ancestors had, or the mechanisms by which they evolved into their modern forms. We solved those problems by studying the problem at the molecular level, where we can resurrect ancestral proteins as they existed long ago and use molecular manipulations to dissect the evolutionary process in both forward and reverse directions."