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Saturn

Liquid Saltwater Is Likely Present On Mars


ScienceDaily
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:29 UTC
Mars Phoenix lander
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Max Planck Institute
Droplets on a leg of the Mars Phoenix lander are seen to darken and coalesce. Nilton Renno, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences says this is evidence that they are made of liquid water.
Salty, liquid water has been detected on a leg of the Mars Phoenix Lander and therefore could be present at other locations on the planet, according to analysis by a group of mission scientists led by a University of Michigan professor. This is the first time liquid water has been detected and photographed outside the Earth.

"A large number of independent physical and thermodynamical evidence shows that saline water may actually be common on Mars," said Nilton Renno, a professor in the U-M Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences and a co-investigator on the Phoenix mission.

"Liquid water is an essential ingredient for life. This discovery has important implications to many areas of planetary exploration, including the habitability of Mars."

Renno will present these findings March 23 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.

Previously, scientists believed that water existed on Mars only as ice or water vapor because of the planet's low temperature and atmospheric pressure. They thought that ice in the Red Planet's current climate could sublimate, or vaporize, but they didn't think it could melt.
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Bell

Feelings, Universal Musical Feelings

Bruce Bower
ScienceNews
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:58 UTC
Mafa music test
© Fritz/ScienceNews
A Mafa man listens to musical pieces through headphones as his wife and child, as well as researcher Thomas Fritz, wait for him to complete the experimental task.
African farmers who shun Western culture demonstrate widespread recognition of three basic emotions in music. Cameroon's Mafa farmers don't know U2 from YouTube, and that's how they like it. So it comes as a scientific revelation that, according to a new study, these Africans who are cocooned from Western culture recognize expressions of happiness, sadness and fear in the same musical passages that Westerners do. This finding provides the first solid evidence for a universal human ability to distinguish basic emotions in music, asserts a team led by cognitive scientist Thomas Fritz of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany.

"I was quite amazed that the Mafa accurately categorized basic emotions in pieces of Western music on the first listen," Fritz says. His team's investigation indicates that Mafa and Western listeners similarly derive emotional meaning from the tempo and key of musical passages. Both groups tended to classify fast-paced pieces as happy and slow ones as scared or fearful, and mostly agreed on which passages were sad, but assigned no particular tempo with them. Mafa and Westerners also generally regarded major-key pieces as happy, minor-key excerpts as fearful and passages with an indeterminate key as sad.
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Magnify

Particle Oddball Surprises Physicists


ScienceDaily
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:44 UTC
Scientists of the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced that they have found evidence of an unexpected particle whose curious characteristics may reveal new ways that quarks can combine to form matter.
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Magnify

Teeth Of Columbus' Crew Flesh Out Tale Of New World Discovery


ScienceDaily
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 01:47 UTC
Image
© Fernando Luna Calderon, provided courtesy of T. Douglas Price
Skeletons that may represent the remains of crew members from Columbus' second excursion to the New World in 1493-94 were exhumed in 1990 by archaeologists from Italy and the Dominican Republic. The burials were a part of La Isabela on the island of Hispaniola, now a part of the Dominican Republic and that was the first European settlement in the New World. Now, a chemical analysis by University of Wisconsin-Madison archaeologist T. Douglas Price and colleagues of the teeth of these skeletons promises details of the individuals early life history, showing where they were born and what they ate, information that promises to reveal new clues about the first European explorers of the New World.
The adage that dead men tell no tales has long been disproved by archaeology.

Now, however, science is taking interrogation of the dead to new heights. In a study that promises fresh and perhaps personal insight into the earliest European visitors to the New World, a team or researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison is extracting the chemical details of life history from the teeth of crew members Christopher Columbus left on the island of Hispaniola after his second voyage to America in 1493-94.
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Cow Skull

Scientists grow diabetes drug in tobacco plants

Ben Hirschler
News Daily
Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:27 UTC
London - Scientists have found a healthy use for tobacco after breeding genetically modified plants containing a medicine that could stop type 1 diabetes.

The move marks the latest advance in the emerging field of molecular farming, which may offer a cheaper way of making biotech drugs and vaccines than traditional factory systems.

European researchers said on Thursday they had produced tobacco plants containing a potent anti-inflammatory protein called interleukin-10 (IL-10) that could help patients with insulin-dependent type 1 diabetes and other autoimmune diseases.
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Saturn

NASA may send fleet of spacecraft to Venus

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:06 UTC
Venus
© NASA/JPL
Two balloons, two landers, and an orbiter could be sent together to Venus in a major 'flagship' mission

Two high-altitude balloons built to hover in sulphuric acid clouds could be part of a future fleet of spacecraft sent to Venus, a NASA advisory team says.

The multi-billion-dollar mission concept - which is being considered for launch in the next fifteen years - could help reveal more about Venus's runaway greenhouse effect, any oceans it may once have had, and possible ongoing volcanic activity.

It could be the next flagship mission sent to a planet, after a planned mission to Jupiter and its moons set for launch in 2020.

The Venus mission would cost some $3 billion to 4 billion and would launch between 2020 and 2025, according to NASA, which in 2008 tasked a group of scientists and engineers to formulate goals for the mission.

The team's study, which will be released in April, outlines a plan to study the hazy planet, which has more in common with Earth than any other in terms of distance from the Sun, size and mass, but evolved into an inhospitable world where surface temperatures hover close to 450°C and sulphuric acid rains from the sky.
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Einstein

Stephen Hawking's bedtime stories

Alison George
New Scientist
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:48 UTC
Stephen Hawking, and his daughter Lucy
© Malcolm Watson
Physicist Stephen Hawking, and his daughter Lucy, are writing children's books about cosmology and physics

Stephen Hawking barely needs an introduction, but his recent direction does. He is packaging the universe for the younger generation. With his daughter Lucy Hawking, he has branched out into writing children's books. They tell Alison George all about it, and recount Stephen's personal alien experience.

Everyone's got a copy of A Brief History of Time, but few have finished it. If we engage children in science young enough, will this change?

Stephen Hawking: The book aroused a great deal of interest, although many people found it difficult to understand. But I believe everyone can, and should, have a broad picture of how the universe operates, and our place in it. This is what I have tried to convey in all my popular books.

It is extremely important to me to write for children. Children ask how things do what they do, and why. Too often they are told that these are stupid questions to ask, but this is said by grown-ups who don't know the answers and don't want to look silly by admitting they don't know. It is important that young people keep their sense of wonder and keep asking why. I'm a child myself, in the sense that I'm still looking. Children are fascinated by black holes and ask me questions. I find they soon get the idea if it is explained in simple language. And yes, it is nice to think a few of them might grow up and read A Brief History from cover to cover.
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Better Earth

Tsunami 'trigger' spotted on Google Earth

Nora Schultz
New Scientist
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:43 UTC
Image
© Google Earth/NASA/AGU
Google Earth view of the feature (marked) that could collapse triggering a devastating wave on the shores of Guadeloupe - see maps (inset)

Spotting risky rock formations that are about to collapse and trigger tsunamis could be done with the help of Google Earth, new research suggests. The software could prove a useful tool where other types of survey prove too difficult or expensive.

One such spot has just been found in the Caribbean by Richard Teeuw from the Geohazard Research Centre at the University of Portsmouth, UK.

See satellite imagery of the volcano for yourself online or in Google Earth.

"We were doing fieldwork on the volcanic island of Dominica in the Lesser Antilles and initially just used Google Earth to identify good study areas," he says. "But with its 3D flyover tool, we quickly got excellent direct glimpses of a slab or rock that may soon cause a tsunami."

The flyover tool allowed Teeuw and his colleagues to examine the million-tonne rock in 3D, and from several angles. They found plenty of evidence that this block of coastline is a landslide waiting to happen. "The flank is undercut by erosion from the sea and we saw scars from recent landslides and tension cracks above the block," he says. "Earthquakes are common in the area and we are pretty sure it's going to go soon."
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Magnet

Evidence mounts for an exotic supersolid

Laura Sanders
Science News
Wed, 18 Mar 2009 02:54 UTC
CRYSTAL GAS
© Mukund Vengalattore and Dan Stamper-Kurn
CRYSTAL GAS
Trapped in a surfboard-shaped formation, ultracold rubidium atoms self-organize into a regular crystal pattern (seen more clearly at right), one of the hallmarks of supersolidity.

Pittsburgh - Hallmarks of an exotic state of matter called a supersolid have been spotted in a gas of ultracold rubidium atoms. In the same piece of matter, researchers found signs of the seemingly disparate properties of both solidity and superfluidity, the frictionless flow of atoms.

Reporting March 18 at a meeting of the American Physical Society, Dan Stamper-Kurn described two telltale signs that suggest this weird state of matter may indeed be a supersolid. The new matter is "a gas, which is superfluid, and also shares properties of a solid," said Stamper-Kurn, of the University of California, Berkeley. If confirmed, a rubidium supersolid could help scientists better understand the properties of this strange state of matter.

"What we've seen is an ability to describe a peculiar state of nature," comments Paul Grant, a former visiting scholar at Stanford University and IBM research staff member emeritus. If the researchers are able to extend their "interesting basic physics" results to come up with new ideas and applications, Grant says, "there may be a Nobel Prize there."
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Better Earth

Microscope Reveals How Soil Bacteria 'Breathe' Toxic Metals


ScienceDaily
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:35 UTC
Researchers are studying some common soil bacteria that "inhale" toxic metals and
soil bacteria
© Brian Lower, Ohio State University
In this atomic force microscope image, the color red indicates where a Shewanella oneidensis bacterium is expressing the protein OmcA in order to "breathe" the metallic mineral hematite. An oval marks the approximate location of the bacterium. OmcA is clearly present around the edges of the bacterium -- in the outer membrane -- and in an ooze surrounding the bacterium
"exhale" them in a non-toxic form. The bacteria might one day be used to clean up toxic chemicals left over from nuclear weapons production decades ago.

Using a unique combination of microscopes, researchers at Ohio State University and their colleagues were able to glimpse how the Shewanella oneidensis bacterium breaks down metal to chemically extract oxygen.

The study, published online the week of March 16 in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, provides the first evidence that Shewanella maneuvers proteins within the bacterial cell into its outer membrane to contact metal directly. The proteins then bond with metal oxides, which the bacteria utilize the same way we do oxygen.
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