Science & Technology
A massive crater in Northern Quebec has been luring the curious for over 50 years. Diamond prospectors, Second World War pilots and National Geographic all made pilgrimages to the distant natural wonder.
Now, an international team led by Laval University in Quebec City has journeyed to the Pingualuit Crater near the Hudson Strait in hopes of unlocking 120,000 years worth of secrets about climate change.
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| ©Michel Bouchard
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| Pingualuit Crater located on the Ungava Peninsula in northern Quebec.
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AFPFri, 25 May 2007 01:29 UTC
Twelve footprints found in the bed of an ancient lake in northern Spain have thrown up the first compelling evidence that some land dinosaurs could swim, researchers reported Thursday.
The 15-metre (48.75-feet) -long track in sandstone "strongly suggests a floating animal clawing the sediment" as it swam against a current, they say.
Jets of matter have been discovered around a very low mass 'failed star', mimicking a process seen in young stars. This suggests that these 'brown dwarfs' form in a similar manner to normal stars but also that outflows are driven out by objects as massive as hundreds of millions of solar masses down to Jupiter-sized objects.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), a rather conservative newspaper in the United States, for Saturday, May 19, 2007, parrots the UK's The Economist, reinforcing the challenge to the concept that we are in the midst of a wave of new species being discovered.
In the WSJ's section "Informed Reader" obviously editorialized thumbnail sketches are given of other newspapers' recommended articles. Under "Nature," a new article in The Economist is mentioned. Entitled "Species Inflation May Infect Over-Eager Conservationists," (I was unable to upload The Economist
article itself), the WSJ notes that various scientists are overzealously boosting the conversation of seemingly rare animals by upgrading subspecies into species. Primatologists are guilty of "taxonomic inflation," we are being told.
Here is the conclusion of the piece that the WSJ is "informing" the reader about:
For years, China has chafed at efforts by the United States to exclude it from full membership in the world's elite space club. So, lately, China seems to have hit on a solution: create a new club.
Beijing is trying to position itself as a space benefactor to the developing world - the same countries, in some cases, whose natural resources China covets here on Earth. The latest, and most prominent, example came last week when China launched a communications satellite for Nigeria in a project that serves as a tidy case study of how space has become another arena where China is trying to exert its soft power.
The University of Delaware is helping to build a huge "IceCube" at the South Pole, and it has nothing to do with cooling beverages.
"IceCube" is a gigantic scientific instrument--a telescope for detecting illusive particles called neutrinos that can travel millions of miles through space, passing right through planets.
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| ©James Roth, University of Delaware
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| The IceCube telescope's optical detectors are deployed in mile-and-a-half deep holes in the Antarctic ice.
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A poet might refer to them as stardust or ghosts from outer space. But to astrophysicists, neutrinos are the high-energy messengers from the universe, formed during such cataclysmic cosmic events as exploding stars and colliding galaxies.
Astronomers are announcing today the discovery of a new class of stellar explosions. The finding is based on observations of a flash seen in the Virgo cluster in a galaxy known as Messier 85.
According to Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, the team leader announcing the discovery of M85OT2006-1, the event is thought to have resulted from the merger of two ordinary stars 49 million years ago.
UPIWed, 23 May 2007 12:49 UTC
U.S. astronomers have determined flares seen after a gamma-ray burst are apparently a continuation of the burst itself.
Gamma-ray bursts release in seconds the same amount of energy the sun will emit during its expected 10 billion-year lifetime. That energy comes from the core of a massive star collapsing to form a black hole or neutron star.
There's no big countdown billboard or sign in Times Square to denote it, but Wednesday, May 23, 2007, represents a major demographic shift, according to scientists from North Carolina State University and the University of Georgia: For the first time in human history, the earth's population will be more urban than rural.
Working with United Nations estimates that predict the world will be 51.3 percent urban by 2010, the researchers projected the May 23, 2007, transition day based on the average daily rural and urban population increases from 2005 to 2010. On that day, a predicted global urban population of 3,303,992,253 will exceed that of 3,303,866,404 rural people.
Though the date is highly symbolic, the researchers - Dr. Ron Wimberley, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at NC State; Dr. Libby Morris, director of the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia; and Dr. Gregory Fulkerson, a sociologist at NC State - advise avoiding the urge to interpret this demographic transition to mean that the urban population has greater importance than the rural.
Rebecca Morelle
BBCThu, 24 May 2007 09:47 UTC
A genetic study has shed light on the mystery of how fish made the move from water to land millions of years ago.
Previous research had suggested that fish had made an abrupt genetic jump to acquire land-friendly limbs.
But a US team has now shown this event was not an evolutionary novelty and the transition was far more gradual.
The study, published in the journal Nature, follows the recent discovery of a fossil described as showing the "missing link" between fins and limbs.
