A precise science demands big hardware
Cambridge University cosmologists working with physicist Stephen Hawking are getting their first real taste of supercomputing power as they upgrade to Silicon Graphics' Altix UV parallel supers.
The UK Computational Cosmology Consortium, which was established in 1997 by Hawking to probe the structure of the universe in the immediate wake of the hot Big Bang, now has over 30 researchers from ten different universities around the country.
COSMOS, as the consortium and its systems are both known, has been an SGI customer since day one, starting out with a 32-processor Origin 2000 parallel system back in 1997 when that was still pretty cool iron.
Science & Technology
© BBC
The Einstein@Home screensaver shows the area of sky being processed
The Einstein@Home screensaver shows the area of sky being processed
The unusual find is called a "disrupted binary pulsar"; these pulsars can be created when a massive star collapses.
The discoverers, from the US and Germany found the object with the help of the Einstein@Home project.
It asks users to donate time on their computers, allowing them to be used for searching through scientific data.
This type of project is known as "distributed computing". Einstein@Home harnesses the power of home machines in order to process large amounts of data.
Credited with the discovery are Chris and Helen Colvin, both information technology professionals from Iowa, US, and systems analyst Daniel Gebhardt from Mainz in Germany.
Their computers, along with 500,000 others from around the world, are being used to analyse data for Einstein@Home.
© University of Arizona/JLP/NASA
The solar system's mightiest planet
The solar system's mightiest planet
Jupiter and Saturn are thought to have begun life as rocky worlds with the mass of at least a few Earths. Their gravity then pulled in gas from their birth nebula, giving them dense atmospheres.
In this picture, all gas giants should have cores of roughly the same size. Yet spacecraft-based gravity measurements suggest Jupiter's core weighs just two to 10 Earth masses, while Saturn's comes in at 15 to 30.
New simulations by Shu Lin Li of Peking University in China, and colleagues, may explain why. They calculated what would happen when a super-Earth of 10 times the mass of our planet slammed into a gas giant. The rocky body flattened like a pancake when it hit the gas giant's atmosphere, then barrelled into the giant's core about half an hour later. The energy of the collision could have vaporised much of the core.
© Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
The AK1000 was developed by Atlantis Resources Corporation, a developer of electricity-generating tidal current turbines, and is due to be installed on the sea bed and connected to the grid at a dedicated berth at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney later this summer.
The company said the turbine is capable of generating enough electricity for more than 1,000 homes and is designed for harsh weather and rough, open ocean environments such as those off the Scottish coast.
© NASA
Neptune's Trojan asteroids, which share the planet's orbit, may outnumber those in the solar system's main asteroid belt
Neptune's Trojan asteroids, which share the planet's orbit, may outnumber those in the solar system's main asteroid belt
Objects can become trapped in two gravitational dead zones around Neptune, where the forces of the sun and the planet balance out. In the last decade, astronomers have identified six asteroids - called Trojans - in the zone that moves in front of the planet along its orbit. But finding Trojans in the region trailing the planet has proved more difficult, because the faint light reflected off of objects there is washed out by brighter starlight from the plane of the Milky Way.
© Scott Sheppard
The green arrow shows the asteroid. The other bright objects are stars in the Milky Way.
The green arrow shows the asteroid. The other bright objects are stars in the Milky Way.
Trojans share their planet's orbit and help astronomers understand how the planets formed and how the solar system evolved. Now Scott Sheppard at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and Chad Trujillo* have discovered the first Trojan asteroid, 2008 LC18, in a difficult-to-detect stability region at Neptune, called the Lagrangian L5 point.
They used the discovery to estimate the asteroid population there and find that it is similar to the asteroid population at Neptune's L4 point. The research is published in the August 12, 2010, online issue of Science Express.
© Oregon State University
Gray rubble on the flanks of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii lie in contrast to the red volcanic rock behind them, and were deposited by a glacier that disappeared thousands of years ago.
Gray rubble on the flanks of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii lie in contrast to the red volcanic rock behind them, and were deposited by a glacier that disappeared thousands of years ago.
A new study has found geochemical clues near the summit of Mauna Kea that tell a story of ancient glacier formation, the influence of the most recent ice age, more frequent major storms in Hawaii, and the impact of a distant climatic event that changed much of the world.
The research was published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters by scientists from Oregon State University, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of British Columbia and U.S. Geological Survey. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.
"Mauna Kea had a large glacial ice cap of about 70 square kilometers until 14,500 years ago, which has now all disappeared," said Peter Clark, a professor of geosciences at OSU. "We've been able to use new data to determine specifically when, where and most likely why the glacier existed and then disappeared."
© Unknown
Prof. Yuval Goren demonstrates the portable x-ray device on an ancient tablet
Prof. Yuval Goren demonstrates the portable x-ray device on an ancient tablet
Now, by adapting an off-the-shelf portable x-ray lab tool that analyzes the composition of chemicals, Prof. Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations can reveal hidden information about a tablet's composition without damaging the precious ancient find itself.
These x-rays reveal the soil and clay composition of a tablet or artefact, to help determine its precise origin.
But Prof. Goren's process, based on x-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry, can go much further. Over the years, he has collected extensive data through physical "destructive" sampling of artefacts.
© Unknown
Mud Cracks, Ordovician Period, Manlius formation (limestone), town of New Salem, (eastern) New York. More evidence of warm shallow sea conditions from 400 million years ago, long before the rocks of the Connecticut Valley formed.
Mud Cracks, Ordovician Period, Manlius formation (limestone), town of New Salem, (eastern) New York. More evidence of warm shallow sea conditions from 400 million years ago, long before the rocks of the Connecticut Valley formed.
The findings have been published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA - and show that these ancient climate belts were surprisingly like those of the present.
The researchers state: "The world of the ancient past had been thought by scientists to differ from ours in many respects, including having carbon dioxide levels much higher - over twenty times as high - than those of the present.
© Don Francis, McGill University
View of the basalts along the northeastern coast of Baffin Island.
View of the basalts along the northeastern coast of Baffin Island.
The Earth's mantle is a rocky, solid shell that is between the Earth's crust and the outer core, and makes up about 84 percent of the Earth's volume. The mantle is made up of many distinct portions or reservoirs that have different chemical compositions.
Scientists had previously concluded that the Earth was slightly older than 4.5 billion years old, but had not found a piece of the Earth's primitive mantle.
Until recently, researchers generally thought that the Earth and the other planets of the solar system were chondritic, meaning that the mantle's chemistry was thought to be similar to that of chondrites--some of the oldest, most primitive objects in the solar system.
