Science & TechnologyS


Einstein

ESC Chicago Keynote Makes Case for Time Travel

Karen Field
RF Design Line
Tue, 08 Jun 2010 13:44 UTC
Ronald Mallett, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Connecticut, gave a mind-bending keynote speech on the physics of time travel to an enthralled audience at the Embedded Systems Conference here Tuesday morning, describing how black holes, blue giant stars, and worm holes (tunnels that connect the mouths of black holes) - some of the strangest things in the Universe - illustrate (at least in theory) the potential for time travel some day.

And that day, Mallett claimed, is not so far in the future as one might think.

"Time travel one of mankind's oldest fantasies. But is it really possible? All of us have wondered what's going to happen in the future, and we've contemplated the question, 'What if I could back and change something in my past?" said Mallet. "I am here to tell you we are on the threshold of making time travel a reality, and it's based on real physics."

Author of "Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality," Mallett explained how the trauma of his father's unexpected death when he was just ten and H.G. Well's book The Time Machine set him on a mission to travel back in time and save his father's life. "Thankfully, I was astute enough not to tell other people about my plan - they were already worried about me," Mallett .

That mission became a lifelong preoccupation, though Mallet says that for many years he used "black holes" as his cover story. "Black holes were considered a crazy idea, but legitimate crazy. That's what helped me survive academia," he said. "It wasn't until I got tenure and was made a full professor that I came out of the time travel closet."
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Sherlock

Who Killed The Iceman?

John Pickrell
Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 07:00 UTC
Image
© South Tyrol Museum of ArchaeologyÖtzi the iceman was murdered more than 5,000 years ago. HIT PLAY, above, to see an X-ray of Ötzi's chest.
The murder of Ötzi the Iceman is perhaps the most challenging cold case in history. Archaeologists used a splay of forensic methods to piece together a detailed picture of his life - and death.

It sounds like the opening to a television forensics drama. On a sunny September day in 1991, a German couple hiking through the Alps make a gruesome discovery.

Initially, the corpse partially jutting out of the melting ice is thought to be from a recent mountaineering accident. But on closer inspection, a far more stunning revelation emerges. The body is that of a murder victim; a murder that transpired five millennia ago.

Dated to around 5,300 years old, the remarkably well-preserved Neolithic Iceman came to be known as Ötzi, after the Ötztal region of the Austrian-Italian border where he was found.

In the years since his discovery, he has been subject to countless, delicate examinations. Now, three recent studies give us the most definitive account of how the Iceman came to be slain.
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Info

Ancient Shoe Steps up Archaeological Insight


UCLA Today
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:18 UTC
Armenian shoe_1
© UCLA TodayA perfectly preserved, 5,500-year-old shoe was discovered in a cave in Armenia by team that included UCLA archaeologists.
An international team that includes eight researchers and students from UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology has found a perfectly preserved, 5,500-year-old shoe in a cave in Armenia.

Believed to be the oldest leather shoe ever discovered, the find dates back to around 3,500 B.C. and was announced today (June 9) in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE.

"Generally, organic materials are poorly preserved in Middle Eastern archaeological sites because of the high content of salts and fungi in the soil and dramatic fluctuations in the temperatures and humidity in the weather," said Gregory Areshian, a visiting associate professor at the Cotsen who was nearby when the discovery was made. "But the condition of this shoe is amazing."

Made of a single piece of cowhide, the shoe was shaped to fit the wearer's foot and was stuffed with grass. Archaeologists aren't sure whether the grass was used as insulation or - as a possible precursor to the modern shoe tree - to maintain the shape of the shoe. They also don't know whether the shoe - the equivalent of a European size 37 or an American women's size 7 - belonged to a male or female.
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Fish

Huge seas 'once existed on Mars'


British Broadcasting Corporation
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 20:45 UTC
Image
© unk The Hellas basin is the largest impact structure on Mars
US scientists have found further evidence that huge seas existed long ago on Mars.

A geological mapping project found sedimentary deposits in a region called Hellas Planitia which suggest a large sea once stood there.

The 2,000 km-wide, 8km-deep Hellas basin is a giant impact crater - the largest such structure on Mars.

The researchers say their data support a lake between 4.5 and 3.5 billion years ago.
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Sherlock

Archaeologists Discover Beehives from Ancient Israel

Clara Moskowitz
The Christian Science Monitor
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:00 UTC
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© Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP PhotoScavenger bees hover around a dead hive at a bee farm east of Merced, Calif.
Archaeologists discover beehives from ancient Israel 3,000 years ago. They appear to be the oldest evidence for beekeeping ever found, scientists reported.

Recently discovered beehives from ancient Israel 3,000 years ago appear to be the oldest evidence for beekeeping ever found, scientists reported.

Archaeologists identified the remains of honeybees - including workers, drones, pupae, and larvae - inside about 30 clay cylinders thought to have been used as beehives at the site of Tel Rehov in the Jordan valley in northern Israel. This is the first such discovery from ancient times.

"Although texts and wall paintings suggest that bees were kept in the Ancient Near East for the production of precious wax and honey, archaeological evidence for beekeeping has never been found," the researchers, led by Guy Bloch of Israel's Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote in a paper in the June 8 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Info

Deeper Impact: Did Mega-Meteors Rattle Our Planet?

Matt Kaplan
New Scientist
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:27 UTC
Smashing Time
© Jayme McGowanA smashing time.
On the west coast of India, near the city of Mumbai, lies a tortured landscape. Faults score the ground, earthquakes are rife, and boiling water oozes up from below forming countless hot springs.

These are testaments to a traumatic history. Further inland, stark mountains of volcanic basalt provide compelling evidence that this entire region - an area of some 500,000 square kilometres known as the Deccan traps - underwent bouts of volcanic activity between 68 and 64 million years ago.

We don't know why. The Deccan traps lie far away from any tectonic plate boundaries, those fractures in Earth's crust through which lava usually forces its way up from the planet's interior. No volcanism on the scale implied by the Deccan traps occurs on Earth now. However, smaller, equally mysterious "hotspots" dot the globe away from plate boundaries - the smoking volcanoes of the Hawaiian islands, for example, or the bubbling geysers of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.

Geologists have generally thought that the history of such features can be traced through the slow churnings and contortions of rock under pressure in Earth's mantle. But it seems there is more to it than that. Sometimes volcanic activity needs - and gets - a helping hand from above.
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Compass

Mapping Project Consistent With Huge Historic Seas On Mars


Mars Daily / SPX
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:11 UTC
Image
© Unknown
A geologic mapping project using NASA spacecraft data offers new evidence that expansive lakes existed long ago on Mars. The research points to a series of sedimentary deposits consistent with what would relate to large standing bodies of water in Hellas Planitia located in the southern hemisphere of Mars, said by Dr.Leslie Bleamaster, research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute.

Fine-layered outcrops around the eastern rim of Hellas have been interpreted as a series of sedimentary deposits resulting from erosion and transport of highland rim materials into a basin-wide standing body of water, Bleamaster said.

Hellas basin, more than 2,000 km across and 8 km deep, is the largest recognized impact structure on the Martian surface, he said.

The mapping project reinforces earlier research that initially proposed Hellas-wide lakes citing different evidence in the west, he said. "This mapping makes geologic interpretations consistent with previous studies, and constrains the timing of these putative lakes to the early-middle Noachian period on Mars, between 4.5 and 3.5 billion years ago," he said.
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Laptop

Hackers Plant Malware on Jerusalem Post Website

John Leyde
The Register
Tue, 08 Jun 2010 01:07 UTC
Scattergun opportunists

Hackers compromised the website of the Jerusalem Post on Monday so that it served up malware.

The attack relied on planting scripts on the site itself, rather than the more common tactic of compromising its ad-serving system to serve tainted ads. The attack ultimately attempted to dump Windows-based malware on the Windows PCs of visiting surfers.

Sophos - which was among the first to document the attack - defines this strain of malware as Behav-290.
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Info

First Video: Australian Deep Sea Canyon

Amy Middleton
Australian Geographic
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:25 UTC
A deep sea canyon off the coast of Western Australia has been filmed for the first time, revealing the habitat of some of Australia's rarest marine life, including the blue whale and a fish that lives for 70 years.

The Perth Canyon is roughly the same size as the Grand Canyon in the US, and is Australia's largest deep-sea canyon at 15 km wide and 1500 m at its deepest point. It was videoed in March by scientists from the University of Western Australia (UWA) and the CSIRO who released the footage today. The team lowered robotic cameras hundreds of metres below sea level to produce the stunning images.

Deep-sea canyons, immense valleys carved over great period of time by erosion, are generally areas that contain an abundance of varied marine life. Professor Jessica Meeuwig, from the UWA's Centre for Marine Futures, says visual documentation of life in the Perth Canyon - which is 22 km west of Rottnest Island and was carved by erosion from Perth's Swan River - is both very exciting and fundamentally important in understanding the entire region of the west coast.
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Display

"Imaginary" Interface Could Replace Screens and Keyboards

Adam Hadhazy
TechNewsDaily
Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:28 UTC
Image
© Hasso Plattner Institute A user draws an imaginary line in the operating plane of the Imaginary Interfaces device.
Researchers are experimenting with a new interface system for mobile devices that could replace the screen and even the keyboard with gestures supported by our visual memory.

Called Imaginary Interfaces, the German project uses a small, chest-mounted computer and camera to detect hand movements. Unlike Tony Stark in Iron Man, who manipulates holographic elements in his lab with his hands, users conjure up their own imaginary set of graphical interfaces.

For example, people can manually draw shapes and select points in space that have programmed functions, such as a power switch or a "send" key, for example.
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