Science & Technology

Gas Cloud Will Collide with our Galaxy's Black Hole in 2013

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Tue, 26 Jun 2012 19:01 UTC

© ESO/MPE
Images taken over the last decade using the NACO instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope show the motion of a cloud of gas that is falling towards the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. This is the first time ever that the approach of such a doomed cloud to a supermassive black hole has been observed and it is expected to break up completely during 2013.

Scientists have determined a giant gas cloud is on a collision course with the black hole in the center of our galaxy, and the two will be close enough by mid-2013 to provide a unique opportunity to observe how a super massive black hole sucks in material, in real time. This will give astronomers more information on how matter behaves near a black hole.

"The next few years will be really fantastic and exciting because we are probing new territory," said Reinhard Genzel, leading a team from the ESO in observations with the Very Large Telescope. "Here this cloud comes in gets disrupted and now it will begin to interact with the hot gas right around the black hole. We have never seen this before."

By June of 2012, the gas cloud is expected to be just 36 light-hours (equivalent to 40,000,000,000 km) away from our galaxy's black hole, which is extremely close in astronomical terms.

Astronomers have determined the speed of the gas cloud has increased, doubling over the past seven years, and is now reaching more than 8 million km per hour. The cloud is estimated to be three times the mass of Earth and the density of the cloud is much higher than that of the hot gas surrounding black hole. But the black hole has a tremendous gravitational force, and so the gas cloud will fall into the direction of the black hole, be elongated and stretched and look like spaghetti, said Stefan Gillessen, astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Munich, Germany, who has been observing our galaxy's black hole, known as Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A*), for 20 years.

Mysterious Arc of Light Spotted with Spitzer Telescope

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:54 UTC

© NASA/ESA/University of Florida, Gainsville/University of Missouri-Kansas City/UC Davis
These images, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, show an arc of blue light behind an extremely massive cluster of galaxies residing 10 billion light-years away.

Seeing is believing, except when you don't believe what you see. Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found a puzzling arc of light behind an extremely massive cluster of galaxies residing 10 billion light-years away. The galactic grouping, discovered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, was observed as it existed when the universe was roughly a quarter of its current age of 13.7 billion years.

The giant arc is the stretched shape of a more distant galaxy whose light is distorted by the monster cluster's powerful gravity, an effect called gravitational lensing. The trouble is, the arc shouldn't exist.

"When I first saw it, I kept staring at it, thinking it would go away," said study leader Anthony Gonzalez of the University of Florida in Gainesville, whose team includes researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "According to a statistical analysis, arcs should be extremely rare at that distance. At that early epoch, the expectation is that there are not enough galaxies behind the cluster bright enough to be seen, even if they were 'lensed,' or distorted by the cluster. The other problem is that galaxy clusters become less massive the further back in time you go. So it's more difficult to find a cluster with enough mass to be a good lens for gravitationally bending the light from a distant galaxy."

Dolphin Genes Hold Clues to Animal Intelligence

Jennifer Welsh
LiveScience
Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:01 UTC

Evolution-wise, bottlenose dolphins have left their mammalian brothers in the dust, and new research is showing what genes they changed to do it. These genes include those involved in brain and metabolism.

These changes could be why dolphins are known to be exceptionally smart, able to use tools, recognize themselves and even communicate with each other and with trainers.

"We are interested in what makes a big brain from a molecular perspective," study researcher Michael McGowen, of Wayne State University School of Medicine in Michigan, told LiveSCience. "We decided to look at genes in the dolphin genome to see if there are similarities in the genes that have changed on the dolphin lineage and those that have changed on the primate lineage."

The researchers compared about 10,000 genes from the bottlenose dolphin with nine other animals. (These included the cow, horse, dog, mouse, human, elephant, opossum, platypus and chicken - cows being the dolphin's closest relatives with a sequenced genome.)

By studying its mutations, they pinpointed which genes were "evolving" or what scientists call "being selected for" - genes that underwent changes and were passed on to future generations of dolphins - by comparing them to the analogous genes from the other species. If a dolphin gene has more protein-changing mutations than the cow version, for instance, that means it was actively evolving in the dolphin population at some time.

80 Percent Of Lightning Strike Victims Are Male, But Why?

Eyder Peralta
NPR
Tue, 26 Jun 2012 07:53 UTC

© Dr. Scott M. Lieberman/AP
Lightning streaks across the sky in Tyler, Texas, as a powerful line of thunderstorms moved across the state in April.

This tweet from the National Weather Service caught our attention, today:

"More than 80% of lightning victims are male. Be a force of nature by knowing your risk, taking action and being an example"

Eighty percent seemed to us pretty significant, so we turned to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and asked, "Why?"

Susan Buchanan, a NOAA spokeswoman, said the agency had not conducted any formal studies, but NOAA and its partners had batted around a few theories.

- First, men take more risks than women. "If you look at the percentage of men who take part in high risk sports, that might give you an idea," said Buchanan.

- Men typically spend more time outside.

- Men, said Buchanan, don't want to be seen as "wimps." This theory, she said, was backed up by talking to the Boy Scouts, who said no one wants to be the one to say it's time to go inside.

Kepler scientists find freaky solar system that's unlike anything we've seen before

io9.com
Tue, 26 Jun 2012 04:47 UTC

NASA scientists working on the Kepler Mission have discovered an unprecedented solar system, in which two planets with vastly different densities and compositions are locked in a surprisingly close orbit around their star. The finding shows that there is much greater diversity in the composition of solar systems than we'd previously thought.

Prior to our discovery of exoplanets, our solar system offered a standard blueprint for astronomers speculating about what other solar systems might look like - namely, rocky planets on the inside, and large gas giants farther out. Then, with the discovery of enormous inner-system gas giants, our conceptions of what other systems might look like took a drastic turn. And now, with the discovery of these two new exoplanets, our imaginations are proving to be completely inadequate.

Men Focused On Muscles Are More Sexist, Study Finds

Jennifer Welsh
LiveScience
Mon, 25 Jun 2012 15:36 UTC

Men obsessed with building muscles are significantly more likely to objectify women, be hostile toward women, and have sexist attitudes, new research finds.

This link may come from their own negative body image, the scientists added.

"We have previously found that men who hold stronger oppressive beliefs are more likely to think that thinner women are attractive," study researcher Viren Swarmi, of the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience in an email.

This sexism and objectification by men can lead to a more negative body image for women, can hinder women in the workplace and can even cause women to perform worse on cognitive tests.

Not only does it impact women, "but we're also arguing that those oppressive beliefs directed at women also have an impact on men's own body images, specifically their drive for muscularity," Swarmi said.

Birds Can Recognize People's Faces and Know Their Voices

Author
ScienceDaily
Fri, 22 Jun 2012 22:38 UTC

© © yellowj / Fotolia
New research suggests that some birds may know who their human friends are, as they are able to recognize people's faces and differentiate between human voices.

New research suggests that some birds may know who their human friends are, as they are able to recognize people's faces and differentiate between human voices.

Being able to identify a friend or potential foe could be key to the bird's ability to survive.

Animal behaviour experts from the University of Lincoln in the UK and the University of Vienna worked with pigeons and crows in two separate studies.

Research published in Avian Biology Research shows that pigeons can reliably discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar humans, and that they use facial features to tell people apart.

The team trained a group of pigeons to recognise the difference between photographs of familiar and unfamiliar objects. These pigeons, along with a control group, were then shown photographs of pairs of human faces. One face was of a person familiar to the birds whilst the other was of someone they had not seen before.

The experimental group birds were able to recognise and classify the familiar people using only their faces, whereas the birds without prior training failed. The results show that pigeons can discriminate between the familiar and unfamiliar people and can do this on solely using facial characteristics.

iBrain Being Developed For Stephen Hawking

Lee Rannals
RedOrbit
Mon, 25 Jun 2012 13:12 UTC

Scientists are working on a project to "hack" into the brain of the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking.

Hawking is working with scientists at Stanford University to develop the iBrain, which is a tool that could be used to pick up brain waves and communicate with them through a computer.

The famous physicist has motor neuron disease and lost the ability to be able to speak nearly 30 years ago.

Hawking currently uses a computer to communicate with people, but his worsening condition is making him lose that ability as well.

The iBrain device being developed by Philip Low, a professor at Stanford, is a brain scanner that measures electrical activity.

"We'd like to find a way to bypass his body, pretty much hack his brain," Low said in a statement.

The iBrain researchers said they plan to unveil their latest results at a conference in Cambridge next month, possibly even demonstrating the technology on Hawking.

US-CERT Warns of Intel CPU Flaw

Douglas Perry
Toms IT Pro
Thu, 21 Jun 2012 18:32 UTC

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has released an advisory note warning users that Intel CPUs are vulnerable to a privilege escalation hack when running 64-bit operating systems.

Intel blames the vulnerability on a software implementation issue and that its processors are running as defined by their spec. It appears that the vulnerability comes from software that does not take the Intel-specific SYSRET instruction into account. The US-CERT warns that the problem allows a local privilege escalation hack and, in virtualized environments, would allow guest administrators to gain hypervisor-level privileges.

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) processors are reportedly not affected. SYSRET is part of the x86-64 standard as defined by AMD. Intel uses a different implementation and it is apparently this difference that can allow an attacker to write to arbitrary addresses in the operating system's memory. Affected operating systems include the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, NetBSD, FreeBSD, as well as Linux distributions, including Red Hat and Suse, and operating environments from Citrix, Joyent, Xen and Oracle.

All affected vendors are providing updates to correct the issue.

Drug Addiction and Hunger May Be Linked

Firstpost.com
Mon, 25 Jun 2012 09:08 UTC

Researchers have zeroed in on a set of nerve cells (neurons) in the brain's hypothalamus that is not only linked with hunger and overeating, but also drives drug addiction.

Researchers focused attention on the brain's reward circuits located in the midbrain to develop treatments for metabolic disorders such as obesity and diabetes.

"Using genetic approaches, we found that increased appetite for food can actually be associated with decreased interest in novelty as well as in cocaine, and on the other hand, less interest in food can predict increased interest in cocaine," said Marcelo O. Dietrich, postdoctoral associate at the Yale School of Medicine.

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Science & Technology

Gas Cloud Will Collide with our Galaxy's Black Hole in 2013

Mysterious Arc of Light Spotted with Spitzer Telescope

Dolphin Genes Hold Clues to Animal Intelligence

80 Percent Of Lightning Strike Victims Are Male, But Why?

Kepler scientists find freaky solar system that's unlike anything we've seen before

Men Focused On Muscles Are More Sexist, Study Finds

Birds Can Recognize People's Faces and Know Their Voices

iBrain Being Developed For Stephen Hawking

US-CERT Warns of Intel CPU Flaw

Drug Addiction and Hunger May Be Linked

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