Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

World's Most Sensitive Astronomical Camera Developed at the Universite de Montreal

Olivier Hernandez
University of Montreal
Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:00 UTC
Montreal - A team of Université de Montréal researchers, led by physics PhD student Olivier Daigle, has developed the world's most sensitive astronomical camera. Marketed by Photon etc., a young Quebec firm, the camera will be used by the Mont-Mégantic Observatory and NASA, which purchased the first unit.

The camera is made up of a CCD controller for counting photons; a digital imagery device that amplifies photons observed by astronomical cameras or by other instruments used in situations of very low luminosity. The controller produces 25 gigabytes of data per second.
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Sherlock

New clue into human evolution found


Xinhua
Tue, 29 Sep 2009 08:19 UTC
Skull
© english.cctv.comSkull found at Dmanisi archaeological site in Georgia, United Stades. Fossils at Dmanisi date back nearly two million years and represent the first prehistoric human fossils ever found outside of Africa.
An archaeological site located in southern Georgia has provided a key element in solving the mystery of human evolution. Let's dig into one of the oldest questions in history.

This archaeological site could hold the secret to human evolution.

Fossils at Dmanisi date back nearly two million years and represent the first prehistoric human fossils ever found outside of Africa.

David Lortkipanidze, director of Georgia's National Museum, said, "We could say for sure that Dmanisi is the earliest site in the whole of Eurasia."
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Info

How a tiny bug slew T. rex

Andy Coghlan
New Scientist
Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:56 UTC
Image
© The Field Museum GEO86284cThe pits in Sue's jawbone probably hurt like hell.
A trip to the dentist could perhaps have saved many a mighty Tyrannosaurus rex.

Holes found in the jawbones of 10 T. Rex - including "Sue" at the Field Museum in Chicago - may not be battle scars from fighting with rivals as previously thought. The holes are more consistent with parasitic infections that gouged holes up to 5 centimetres wide in the bone, says Ewan Wolff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His team examined 61 T. Rex jawbones and observed the holes in 1 in 6 of them. They say the lesions do not resemble bites, but instead are akin to the lesions that protozoan parasite Trichomonas gallinae causes in birds - especially birds of prey such as hawks and ospreys.

"I think it would have been very painful," says Wolff. "Probably, most of the pain would come from feeding and the back of the throat, so it would have been very difficult to swallow and likely difficult to breathe." He concludes that the infected animals probably starved to death as a result.
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Info

Concepts are born in the hippocampus

Nic Fleming
New Scientist
Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:41 UTC
Image
© Bjorn Mansson/IBL/RexFile under "dog"
A diminutive chihuahua and a lumbering Irish wolfhound look completely different, yet most us know they both belong to the concept called "dog". Now the brain regions responsible for our ability to organise the world into separate concepts have been pinpointed.

Forming a concept involves selecting the important characteristics of our experiences and categorising them. The degree to which we are able to do this effectively is a defining characteristic of human intelligence. Yet little is known about how conceptual knowledge is created and used in the brain.

Fractal patterns

In an attempt to identify the brain regions responsible, Dharshan Kumaran and colleagues at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, showed 25 volunteers pairs of fractal patterns that represented the night sky and asked them to forecast the weather - either rain or sun - based on the patterns.

Conceptual rules based on the positions and combinations of the patterns governed whether the resulting outcome would be rain or sun, but the volunteers were not told this. Instead correct predictions were rewarded with cash prizes, encouraging the volunteers to deduce these conceptual rules.
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Info

5,000-year-old Venus figure found in Çanakkale


Today's Zaman
Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:59 UTC
Image
© UnknownA 5,000-year-old Venus figure and a seal have been found in an excavation.
A 5,000-year-old Venus figure has been found as part of an excavation being carried out in Çanakkale's Ezine district.

The excavation began in the field three weeks ago in cooperation with Germany's University of Tübingen. Assistant Professor Rüstem Aslan, who is vice head of the excavation, told the Anatolia news agency that the aim of the dig is to find settlements outside Troy from the Bronze Age.
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Telescope

Sea Level Stargazing: Astronomers Make Key Sighting with Florida Telescope


University of Florida
Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:54 UTC
This summer, University of Florida astronomers inaugurated the world's largest optical telescope on a nearly 8,000-foot mountaintop 3,480 miles away.

But it was a far more modest observatory, located just above sea level in rural Levy County and just down the road from the UF campus, that proved key to a new discovery about what one astronomer termed "one of the weirdest" planets outside our solar system.

Three UF astronomers are among the authors of a paper that will appear Thursday in Astrophysical Journal, the leading journal in astronomy, pinning down the extravagantly unusual orbit of HD 80606b, a Jupiter-sized planet nearly 200 light years away. The astronomers made observations of the planet eclipsing its star from a 41-year-old telescope at the department's Rosemary Hill Observatory 30 miles west of Gainesville in Bronson.
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Magnify

Discovery Brings New Type of Fast Computers Closer to Reality

Kim McDonald
University of California, San Diego
Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:48 UTC
Image
© UnknownAlex High and Aaron Hammack adjust the optics in their UCSD lab.
Physicists at UC San Diego have successfully created speedy integrated circuits with particles called "excitons" that operate at commercially cold temperatures, bringing the possibility of a new type of extremely fast computer based on excitons closer to reality.
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Sherlock

DNA Test Shows Hitler's Skull is That of a Woman


NEWS.com.au
Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:15 UTC
Skull
© ReutersResearch on a skull fragment thought to be Adolf Hitler's has cast doubt on the circumstances of his death.
Adolf Hitler may not have died in a bunker after fresh research suggests the skull thought to be the tyrant's was from a woman.

US archaeologist Nick Bellantoni found fragments from the skull believed to be Hitler's were too thin to be from a male, and suspected it was the remains of a much younger woman, The Sun reports.

"The bone seemed very thin - male bone tends to be more robust. It corresponds to a woman between the ages of 20 and 40," Dr Bellantoni said.

DNA tests performed in a US laboratory confirmed the remains could not have belonged to the Nazi leader.

The discovery casts doubt on the exact circumstances of Hitler's death and could force history books to be rewritten.
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Light Saber

NASA Goddard Shoots The Moon To Track Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Bill Steigerwald
Moon Daily / SPX
Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:31 UTC
Image
© Tom Zagwodzki/Goddard Space Flight CenterGoddard's Laser Ranging Facility directing a laser (green beam) toward the LRO spacecraft in orbit around the moon (white disk). The moon has been deliberately over-exposed to show the laser.
On certain nights, an arresting green line pierces the sky above NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It's a laser directed at the moon, visible when the air is humid. No, we're not repelling an invasion. Instead, we're tracking our own spacecraft.

28 times per second, engineers at NASA Goddard fire a laser that travels about 250,000 miles to hit the minivan-sized Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft moving at nearly 3,600 miles per hour as it orbits the moon.

The first laser ranging effort to track a spacecraft beyond low-Earth orbit on a daily basis produces distance measurements accurate to about four inches (10 centimeters). For comparison, the microwave stations tracking LRO measure its range to a precision of about 65 feet (20 meters).
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Sherlock

If You Want to Catch a Liar, Make Him Draw

David DiSalvo
Neuronarrative
Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:36 UTC
movie interrogation
© unknown
A man accused of a crime is brought into a police interrogation room and sits down at an empty table. There's no polygraph equipment in sight, and the typical two-cop questioning team isn't in the room either. Instead, one officer enters the room with a piece of paper and a pencil in his hands. He sets them in front of the suspect, steps back, and calmly says, "draw."

That's a greatly oversimplified description of what could happen in actual interrogation rooms if the results of a recent study in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology are widely adopted. The study is the first to investigate whether drawing is an effective lie detection technique in comparison to verbal methods.
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