London - With someone to polish his shoes, make his bed and stoke the fire in his spacious rooms, Charles Darwin enjoyed the sort of pampered university life that today's debt-laden British students can only dream about.
Two hundred years after his birth, academics have uncovered new details of his comfortable existence at the University of Cambridge before he embarked on the grueling five-year voyage that would transform science's view of the world.
Science & Technology
© Unknown
Imagine you've bellied up to the all-you-can-eat pasta bar in Berkeley, only to meet one of the mice from Hei Sook Sul's Nutritional Science and Toxicology Lab.
If you come here often, you know that loading up on carbohydrates is going to make you pretty chubby. But you notice that your fellow diner -- the mouse -- is pretty slim.
How does he do it?
© Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Are the objects we see just pale projections of quantum reality?
Are the objects we see just pale projections of quantum reality?
I believe that some of our most engrained notions about space and causality should be reconsidered. Anyone who takes quantum mechanics seriously will have reached the same conclusion.
What quantum mechanics tells us, I believe, is surprising to say the least. It tells us that the basic components of objects - the particles, electrons, quarks etc. - cannot be thought of as "self-existent". The reality that they, and hence all objects, are components of is merely "empirical reality".
Cairo - Egyptian antiquities authorities on Thursday revealed an ancient pharaonic embalming bed unearthed from a mysterious tomb near Luxor used to prepare bodies for mummification.
The wooden bed was painstakingly restored after being discovered in pieces in the KV-63 tomb in southern Egypt's famous Valley of the Kings, next to Tutankhamun's tomb, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said in a statement.
The wooden bed was painstakingly restored after being discovered in pieces in the KV-63 tomb in southern Egypt's famous Valley of the Kings, next to Tutankhamun's tomb, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said in a statement.
Washington - The U.S. software industry is pushing for a greater role as government officials develop a policy to ward off attacks on the nation's communications infrastructure, a trade group said on Friday.
The Business Software Alliance, which represents companies including Microsoft Corp and Dell Inc., told White House officials this week the government should share more threat and attack information with the industry.
The Business Software Alliance, which represents companies including Microsoft Corp and Dell Inc., told White House officials this week the government should share more threat and attack information with the industry.
© ESA
Artist's conception of SOLO
Artist's conception of SOLO
The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA today announced their preliminary selections for the instruments that will fly aboard ESA's forthcoming Solar Orbiter satellite, which will orbit the sun closer than ever before.
The satellite, sometimes known as SOLO, will keep tabs on the sun and the space weather it creates from a cozy position next to our star - inside the orbit of Mercury and less than one-fourth the distance from Earth to the sun. (By comparison, NASA and ESA's currently operating Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, is positioned much farther out - roughly 99 percent of the way from the sun to Earth.) SOLO will also provide a rare glimpse of the polar regions of the sun.
© Hubble Space Telescope
The Crab nebula is the result of a type II supernova explosion observed by Chinese astronomers in 1054. The nebula consists of the outer parts of a red supergiant that exploded after having burned all its fuel. The nebula is still expanding into the surrounding interstellar medium with velocities of several thousand kilometers per second. In the middle of the nebula there is a neutron star, which is the collapsed central, dead core of the exploded star.
The Crab nebula is the result of a type II supernova explosion observed by Chinese astronomers in 1054. The nebula consists of the outer parts of a red supergiant that exploded after having burned all its fuel. The nebula is still expanding into the surrounding interstellar medium with velocities of several thousand kilometers per second. In the middle of the nebula there is a neutron star, which is the collapsed central, dead core of the exploded star.
Where do supernovae come from? Astronomers have long believed they were exploding stars, but by analysing a series of images, researchers from the Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen and from Queens University, Belfast have proven that two dying red supergiant stars produced supernovae. The results are published in the journal Science.
A star is a large ball of hot gas and in its incredibly hot interior hydrogen atoms combine to form helium, which subsequently forms carbon, other heavier elements and finally iron. When all the atoms in the centre have turned to iron the fuel is depleted and the star dies. When very large and massive stars, that are at least about eight times as massive as our sun, die, they explode as supernovae.
© Queen's University Belfast
The twist applied to magnetic field lines in the solar atmosphere induce an upward propagating Alfvén wave.
The twist applied to magnetic field lines in the solar atmosphere induce an upward propagating Alfvén wave.
Scientists at Queen's University have made a finding that will help us to understand more about the turbulent solar weather and its affect on our planet. Along with scientists at the University of Sheffield and California State University, the researchers have detected giant twisting waves in the lower atmosphere of the Sun.
The discovery sheds some light on why the Sun's corona, the region around the Sun, has a much higher temperature than its surface - something that has always puzzled scientists.
The surface of the sun, known as the photosphere, can reach temperatures of 5,000 degrees. To many it would seem logical that the temperature would lower further away from the sun. But, the outer atmosphere, known as the corona, has been shown to reach temperatures of over a million degrees.
© University of Arizona/JPL/NASA
Mounds at a site in the northern plains of Mars bear a striking resemblance to mud volcanoes on Earth
Mounds at a site in the northern plains of Mars bear a striking resemblance to mud volcanoes on Earth
Is life bubbling onto the Martian surface in muddy squirts? The discovery of what could be mud volcanoes on the planet suggest it is possible, providing a new focus in the hunt for alien microbes.
Three plumes have recently been identified as sources of methane in Mars's atmosphere (New Scientist, 24 January, p 19). This has led to suggestions that the gas could have been produced by microbes living a few kilometres beneath the surface, where it could be warm enough for liquid water to persist.
This would be difficult to confirm as drilling that deep for samples on another planet is beyond current technology. Now it seems that nature may have done the hard work for us, bringing mud from deep within the planet to the surface via mud volcanoes.
Using images from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, Dorothy Oehler and Carlton Allen of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, identified dozens of mounds at a site in the northern plains of Mars that bear a striking resemblance to mud volcanoes on Earth. These form a distinctive large hill of sediment with a central crater (see photo).
