Science & TechnologyS


Cloud Lightning

Venezuelan government to 'seed' clouds with rain

Frank Jack Daniel
Reuters
Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:30 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez says he will join a team of Cuban scientists on flights to "bomb clouds" to create rain amid a severe drought that has aroused public anger due to water and electricity rationing.

Chavez, who has asked Venezuelans to take three-minute showers to save water, said the Cubans had arrived in Venezuela and were preparing to fly specially equipped aircraft above the Orinoco river.

"I'm going in a plane; any cloud that crosses me, I'll zap it so that it rains," Chavez said at a ceremony late on Saturday with family members of five Cubans convicted of spying in the United States.

Many countries have programs aimed at altering weather patterns, commonly known as cloud seeding, although the effectiveness of such techniques is disputed.

Firing silver iodine at clouds is one common method. China uses rockets loaded with the chemical to spur rainfall in arid regions. Chavez did not say what technology the Cubans will use.
Read More...
Snowman

Taking A Bite Of Antarctic Ice

Henry Bortman
Astrobiology Magazine
Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:03 UTC
Image
© UnknownAntarctica's mile-high University Valley lies within the only region on Earth where the terrain matches that of Phoenix landing site. This is where NASA's IceBite team will test ice-penetrating drills for a future Mars mission.
Scientists with NASA's IceBite project are heading this week for University Valley, a hanging valley perched more than 1600 meters (more than 1 mile) above sea level in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys. Their objective: to test a set of ice-penetrating drills and select one for use on a future mission to the martian polar north, the same region of the planet that NASA's Phoenix lander investigated in 2008.

The northern polar region on Mars is of particular interest to scientists because it once may have provided a habitable environment for life. Due to variations over time in Mars' orbit and the angle at which it tilts toward the Sun, Mars' north pole received much more sunlight several million years ago than it does today -- enough sunlight to produce liquid water, enough liquid water to support life. Indeed NASA's Phoenix lander found evidence in martian Arctic soil that liquid water had been present there in the past.

That makes the martian northern plains a favored place for a future mission to Mars targeted at the search for life. And it makes analogue sites on Earth, locations that mimic the conditions encountered by Phoenix, a good place to prepare for a Phoenix follow-up mission. University Valley, where IceBite researchers will conduct their field work, is just such a site.
Read More...
Magnify

Valley in Jordan inhabited and irrigated for 13,000 years


Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research
Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:47 UTC
You can make major discoveries by walking across a field and picking up every loose item you find. Dutch researcher Eva Kaptijn succeeded in discovering - based on 100,000 finds - that the Zerqa Valley in Jordan had been successively inhabited and irrigated for more than 13,000 years. But it was not just communities that built irrigation systems: the irrigation systems also built communities.

Archaeologist Eva Kaptijn has given up digging in favour of gathering. With her colleagues, she has been applying an intensive field exploration technique: 15 metres apart, the researchers would walk forward for 50 metres. On the outward leg, they'd pick up all the earthenware and, on the way back, all of the other material. This resulted in more than 100,000 finds, varying from about 13,000 years to just a few decades old. Based on further research on the finds and where they were located, Kaptijn succeeded in working out the extent of habitation in the Zerqa Valley in Jordan over the past millennia.
Read More...
Light Sabers

New on-off 'switch' triggers and reverses paralysis in animals with a beam of light

Michael Bernstein
American Chemical Society
Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:39 UTC
Image
© American Chemical SocietyThis tiny worm became temporarily paralyzed when scientists fed it a light-sensitive material, or "photoswitch," and then exposed it to ultraviolet light.
In an advance with overtones of Star Trek phasers and other sci-fi ray guns, scientists in Canada are reporting development of an internal on-off "switch" that paralyzes animals when exposed to a beam of ultraviolet light. The animals stay paralyzed even when the light is turned off. When exposed to ordinary light, the animals become unparalyzed and wake up. Their study appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS). It reports the first demonstration of such a light-activated switch in animals.
Read More...
Sherlock

Heart Disease Found in Egyptian Mummies


ScienceDaily
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:00 UTC
Image
© Dr. Michael Miyamoto/UC San DiegoThe mummy of Esankh, male, Third Intermediate Period (1070-712 BCE), undergoing CT scanning.
Hardening of the arteries has been detected in Egyptian mummies, some as old as 3,500 years, suggesting that the factors causing heart attack and stroke are not only modern ones; they afflicted ancient people, too.

Study results are appearing in the Nov. 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and are being presented Nov. 17 at the Scientific Session of the American Heart Association at Orlando, Fla.

"Atherosclerosis is ubiquitous among modern day humans and, despite differences in ancient and modern lifestyles, we found that it was rather common in ancient Egyptians of high socioeconomic status living as much as three millennia ago," says UC Irvine clinical professor of cardiology Dr. Gregory Thomas, a co-principal investigator on the study. "The findings suggest that we may have to look beyond modern risk factors to fully understand the disease."
Read More...
Magnify

The Vanished Army: Solving an Ancient Egyptian Mystery

Ishaan Tharoor
Time
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:45 UTC
Image
© CorbisAn ancient Persian stone relief in Persepolis, Iran

In 525 B.C., the Persian Emperor Cambyses dispatched 50,000 of his soldiers to lay waste to an oasis temple in the Sahara because its oracle had spoken ill of his plans for world domination.
The punitive expedition proved to be one of antiquity's most dramatic episodes of imperial overreach. One morning, while the army was having breakfast, writes the ancient historian Herodotus in The Histories, it was set upon by "a violent southern wind, bringing with it piles of sand, which buried them." The Greek continues, "Thus it was that they utterly disappeared."

For centuries, this little anecdote - like many others in Herodotus's famous text - seemed to be a myth. The Histories is lined with rumors and fantastical hearsay of ants that dig for gold, rings that make their bearers invisible and winged serpents that patrol remote mountain passes.

But recent excavations in western Egypt by a team of Italian archaeologists may have unearthed traces of this long-lost army, entombed in the desert for some 2,500 years.
Read More...
Magnify

Indus Valley's Bronze Age Civilisation 'Had First Sophisticated Financial Exchange System'

Dean Nelson
The Telegraph
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:20 UTC
The Indus Valley's Bronze Age civilisation may have developed the world's first sophisticated system of wage labour, financial exchange and measurement, a Canadian mathematician has discovered.

According to a new study of clay pots and ceramic tablets discovered almost 70 years ago in Harappa, now in Pakistan, the people of the Indus Valley had a detailed system of commodity value, weights and measures.

Dr Bryan Wells, a researcher based at India's Institute of Mathematical Sciences, told The Daily Telegraph he had begun work on his thesis ten years ago when he first saw photographs of the clay pots with markings which appeared to be in proportion to their relative size.
Read More...
Info

Counterfeit euros are detected with an optical mouse


Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:05 UTC
Image
© Tresanchez et al. / SINCThis image shows the detection of a false two-euro coin (this is a Thai currency) and detail of the optical sensor with a valid currency.
The sensor of some optical mice can be used to easily and cheaply detect counterfeit euros, according to a study published by researchers of the University of Lleida (UdL) in the scientific journal Sensors. Almost 80% of counterfeit coins discovered in Europe in 2008 were two-euro coins.

The sensor, incorporated in optical computer mice, is usually used to guide cursor movement, but can also be used as a counterfeit coin detector. This has been demonstrated by a prototype developed by computer engineers from the UdL, whose details can be consulted openly and for free in the scientific journal Sensors.
Read More...
Magnify

Spotting evidence of directed percolation

James Riordon
American Physical Society
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:54 UTC
Image
© Alan StonebrakerThis is an illustration of directed percolation in 1+1 dimensions: Activity percolates through open bonds (red lines), activating nearest neighbors and giving rise to a cluster of activity.
A team of physicists has, for the first time, seen convincing experimental evidence for directed percolation, a phenomenon that turns up in computer models of the ways diseases spread through a population or how water soaks through loose soil. Their observation strengthens the case for directed percolation's relevance to real systems, and lends new vigor to long-standing theories about how it works. Their experiment is reported in Physical Review E and highlighted with a Viewpoint in the November 16 issue of Physics (http://physics.aps.org).
Read More...
Cell Phone

Apple Wouldn't Risk Its Cool Over a Gimmick, Would It?

Randall Stross
New York Times
Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:00 UTC
Jobs
© Eric Palma
"Some of the best-loved technology on the planet" is how Apple describes its products when recruiting new employees. It's a fair description.

But the love that consumers send Apple's way could flag if the company puts into place new advertising technology it has developed. In an application filed last year and made public last month by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Apple is seeking a patent for technology that displays advertising on almost anything that has a screen of some kind: computers, phones, televisions, media players, game devices and other consumer electronics.

Filing a patent application, of course, doesn't necessarily mean that the company plans to use the technology. But the application shows, at the least, that Apple has invested in research to develop what it calls an "enforcement routine" that makes people watch ads they may not want to watch.

Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn't simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad - it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.
Read More...