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Beautiful death-star could threaten Earth

Kath Kenny
The University of Sydney
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:57 UTC


Binary star
©Unknown

The Earth may be in the firing line when one of the sky's most beautiful objects explodes, according to University of Sydney astronomer Peter Tuthill.

Dr Tuthill discovered the elegant rotating pinwheel system, named WR104, eight years ago in the constellation Sagittarius. It includes a highly unstable star known as a Wolf-Rayet, widely regarded by astronomers as ticking bombs - the last stop in a star's life before a cataclysmic supernova explosion.

"When it finally explodes as a supernova, it could emit an intense beam of gamma rays coming our way", says Dr Tuthill, whose work is published in the latest edition of the Astrophysical Journal.
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Ladybug

Plants Evolving to Self Destruct

Roger Highfield
Telegraph
Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:11 UTC
The relentless advance of urban sprawl across the planet is forcing plants to spread fewer seeds which could place them at even greater risk of extinction.

* Self destructing palm tree found in Madagascar
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Info

Windmill With A Twist Can Provide Fresh Water From Seawater Directly


sciencedaily.com
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:26 UTC
A traditional windmill which drives a pump: that is the simple concept behind the combination of windmill/reverse osmosis developed by the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in The Netherlands.

In this case, it involves a high-pressure pump which pushes water through a membrane using approximately 60 bar. This reverse osmosis membrane produces fresh water from seawater directly.

windmill seawater
©Delft University of Technology
The first prototype has been built and is already working at a location near the A13 motorway near Delft. This prototype is to be dismantled and transported to Curaçao the first week of March. There the concept will be tested on seawater.
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Magnify

Technology Uses Live Cells To Detect Food-borne Pathogens, Toxins


sciencedaily.com
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:19 UTC
Researchers have developed a new technology that can simultaneously screen thousands of samples of food or water for several dangerous food-borne pathogens in one to two hours.

food born toxins
©Purdue Agricultural Communication photo/Tom Campbell
Purdue researcher Pratik Banerjee, at left, measures fluid as he and professor of food science Arun Bhunia work in the lab. Their technology uses common lab materials to quickly screen food and water samples for several food-borne pathogens and toxins.
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Telescope

Avalanches On Mars Photographed By NASA Spacecraft


sciencedaily.com
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:14 UTC
A NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars has taken the first ever image of active avalanches near the Red Planet's north pole. The image shows tan clouds billowing away from the foot of a towering slope, where ice and dust have just cascaded down.

Image
©NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Image of one of at least four Martian avalanches, or debris falls, captured in action. It was taken on February 19, 2008, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
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Info

HIV Breakthrough: Protein That Fights Immunodeficiency Identified


sciencedaily.com
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:08 UTC
A Canada-U.S. research team has solved a major genetic mystery: How a protein in some people's DNA guards them against killer immune diseases such as HIV. In an advance online edition of Nature Medicine, the scientists explain how the protein, FOX03a, shields against viral attacks and how the discovery will help in the development of a HIV vaccine.

HIV Virus
©Produced by Richard Feldmann; NIH/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
Computer model of AIDS virus (HIV).
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Bulb

140-year-old math problem solved by researcher


Imperial College London
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:41 UTC
A problem which has defeated mathematicians for almost 140 years has been solved by a researcher at Imperial College London.

Professor Darren Crowdy, Chair in Applied Mathematics, has made the breakthrough in an area of mathematics known as conformal mapping, a key theoretical tool used by mathematicians, engineers and scientists to translate information from a complicated shape to a simpler circular shape so that it is easier to analyse.

This theoretical tool has a long history and has uses in a large number of fields including modelling airflow patterns over intricate wing shapes in aeronautics. It is also currently being used in neuroscience to visualise the complicated structure of the grey matter in the human brain.

A formula, now known as the Schwarz-Christoffel formula, was developed by two mathematicians in the mid-19th century to enable them to carry out this kind of mapping. However, for 140 years there has been a deficiency in this formula: it only worked for shapes that did not contain any holes or irregularities.
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Clock

Innovative archaeological survey reveals unknown aspects of China's past


Field Museum
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:34 UTC
Imagine future archaeologists trying to understand Illinois, California or New York based on a few excavations in each of those states. They might excavate small areas in city centers, since those sites would probably be the first ruins they would come across. Meanwhile, the archaeologists they might fail to notice or study farms, suburbs, shopping malls, canals and airports.

Image
©Photo by Anne Underhill, courtesy of The Field Museum
Scientists walk through tea fields in southeastern Shandong as part of an innovative settlement pattern regional survey that uncovered important new evidence about how this region of China developed. This photograph was taken in 2006, and the team has completed 13 years of survey to date, making it one of the longest running collaborations of any kind between Chinese and American scientists. On the right, Linda Nicholas, Adjunct Curator of Anthropology at The Field Museum, carries a map on which she marks the distribution of the prehistoric and Early Bronze Age sherds found during the survey.
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Heart

The Hope

Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Signs of the Times
Mon, 02 Apr 2007 10:11 UTC

Comment: We have decided to re-run this article published April of last year. For some curious reason, searching for it on google gives no returns even when specific phrases from the text are used in quotes for the search. We suspect that this particular piece is being suppressed stringently for some reason and hope that as many of you as possible will share it around, cross-post it, link to it, and otherwise make the information contained herein widely available in spite of google.


©Signs of the Times

My last contribution to the Blogosphere must have been pretty scary. Geeze! You shoulda seen my mail! People going bananas and writing "what to do? what to do!?"

Well, this one's not going to be any better. But let me say in advance that today's particular collection of items will lead us to a certain point of hope which I wish to elucidate at the end.
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Cloud Lightning

Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age

Michael Asher
Daily Tech
Sat, 09 Feb 2008 13:15 UTC
Global Cooling comes back in a big way

Dr. Kenneth Tapping is worried about the sun. Solar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quiet. The last time this happened was 400 years ago -- and it signaled a solar event known as a "Maunder Minimum," along with the start of what we now call the "Little Ice Age."

Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, says it may be happening again. Overseeing a giant radio telescope he calls a "stethoscope for the sun," Tapping says, if the pattern doesn't change quickly, the earth is in for some very chilly weather.
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