Science & TechnologyS


Question

Deep Sea Fish 'Mystery Migration' Across Pacific Ocean

Matt Walker
BBC Earth News
Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:55 UTC
Deep Sea Creatures
© A.ARKHIPKINDeepwater travellers: A) deepwater slipskin and B) gonate squid
Deep sea fish species found in the north Pacific Ocean have mysteriously been caught in the southwest Atlantic, on the other side of the world.

It is unclear how the animals, a giant rattail grenadier, pelagic eelpout and deep sea squid, travelled so far.

Their discovery 15,000km from their usual home raises the possibility that deep sea currents can transport animals from one polar region to another.

Details are published in the journal Deep Sea Research part I.

"These findings were completely unexpected," says Dr Alexander Arkhipkin of the Falkland Islands Fisheries Department, based in Stanley, on the Falkland Islands in the southwest Atlantic Ocean.

Since 1987, the Falkland Islands Fisheries Department has performed surveys of fish caught by commercial and research fishing trawlers travelling above the Patagonian Shelf and slope around the islands.

Commercial longline catches of Patagonian toothfish have also been examined.

Recently, these catches have brought to the surface animals previously unknown in the southwest Atlantic.
Read More...
Saturn

Mystery Space Object Hits Jupiter

Jesus Diaz
Gizmodo
Thu, 03 Jun 2010 14:33 UTC
Image
On the third week of July 1994, comet Shoemaker-Levy crashed into Jupiter's fiery atmosphere. NASA says that another "mystery space object" hit during the same week but 15 years later, leaving a bruise as big as the Pacific Ocean.

Judging by the series of images taken by Hubble's newly-installed Wide Field Camera 3, the current theory is that the object was a 1,600-foot wide asteroid. Analysis of the angle and size of the bruise reveals that the mystery object possibly came from the Hilda belt, a group of 1,100 asteroids orbiting near Jupiter. [NASA via NASA Goddard Twitter]
Read More...
Binoculars

Russia Discovers World War II Nazi Arms Ship in Baltic


BBC News
Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:40 UTC
Image
© BBC News
Russian authorities are preparing to remove a huge arsenal of shells from a sunken German World War II barge off the Baltic coast.

The wreck is just 1.5km (0.9 miles) from the shore, near the town of Baltiysk, and about 20m (66ft) down.

More than 10,000 shells containing explosives are on board, but without detonators, a Russian government official told the BBC.

The removal work could take two years, Maxim Vladimirov said.

The operation, involving 18 divers, is scheduled to begin later this month.
Read More...
Robot

Rise of the replicators

Tom Simonite
New Scientist
Thu, 03 Jun 2010 11:58 UTC
I am standing in a cold north London workshop looking expectantly at a bizarre metal and plastic contraption. An acrid smell drifts from the machine as a length of plastic is drawn into a barrel at its centre and heated up. The molten plastic squirts from a nozzle onto a platform moving beneath it, drawing a pattern. The nozzle also moves up and down to build the design upwards like an expert cake icer.

Read More...
Telescope

Giant glowing bubbles found around Milky Way

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Thu, 03 Jun 2010 11:30 UTC
Image
© NASABubble time
Is the Milky Way blowing giant bubbles? A pair of gamma ray bubbles, shaped like an hourglass, seem to be spewing from the black hole we think lies at the centre of our galaxy. That is according to the latest maps from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Its large area telescope has been scanning the whole sky every three hours since June 2008.

The source of the bubbles is a mystery but it seems unlikely that dark matter is responsible. This was what Douglas Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, first suspected when he looked at the maps with his colleagues last year.

But a new analysis with more Fermi data suggests that the gamma radiation traces out a pair of distinct bubbles that span some 65,000 light years from end to end - towering above the 2000-light-year-thick disc of the galaxy. Such a well-defined shape is inconsistent with dark matter, which you would expect to be smoothly distributed and produce a diffuse glow, from gamma rays produced after dark matter particles meet and annihilate each other. "We are pretty sure the majority of emissions are not from dark matter," says Finkbeiner's student Meng Su.
Read More...
Info

Florentine Codex, Great Intellectual Enterprise of 16th Century


artdaily.org
Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:39 UTC
Image
© unknownBilingual and bicultural, this ancient encyclopedia was written in two columns, one in Nahuatl and the other in Spanish.
Created under the orders of Bernardino de Sahagun by 20 tlacuilos or painters and 4 Indigenous masters, Florentine Codex is one of the greatest expressions of the Renascence in America.

Bilingual and bicultural, this ancient encyclopedia was written in two columns, one in Nahuatl and the other in Spanish as a summary, and is integrated by 4,000 handwritten pages with 2,686 colored images; each book has a prologue where Sahagun places the work in its dimension and time.

Restorer Diana Magaloni had access to the original document at the Laurentian Library (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana) in Florence, Italy, to deepen research: She refers that being as it is one of the most important Mexican pictographic documents guarded abroad, it must be included in the Mexican Digital Library.
Read More...
Magnify

Neanderthal man was living in Britain 40,000 years earlier than thought


Telegraph.co.uk
Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:28 UTC
Neanderthal man was living in Britain at the start of the last ice age - 40,000 years earlier than previously thought, archaeologists have said.

The country was previously assumed to have been uninhabited during this period.

''I couldn't believe my eyes when I received the test results,'' said Dr Wenban-Smith.

''We know that Neanderthals inhabited Northern France at this time, but this new evidence suggests that as soon as sea levels dropped, and a 'land bridge' appeared across the English Channel, they made the journey by foot to Kent.''
Read More...
Magnify

A Family Feud Over Mendel's Manuscript on the Laws of Heredity

Nicholas Wade
New York Times
Mon, 31 May 2010 05:00 UTC
Image
© Getty ImagesGregor Mendel, above, laid the foundations of modern genetics with his experiments on pea plants.
A long lost manuscript, one of the most important in the history of modern biology, has resurfaced as part of a dispute over its ownership.

The manuscript is the account by Gregor Mendel of the pea-breeding experiments from which he deduced the laws of heredity and laid the foundations of modern genetics.

Mendel read his paper in 1865 at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brünn. He was then an Augustinian monk, later the abbot, in the Abbey of St. Thomas in Brünn, now Brno in the Czech Republic.

The paper was published the next year in the Brünn Natural History Society's journal, but Mendel's work was largely ignored during his lifetime. It was only in 1900, 16 years after his death, that other researchers rediscovered Mendel's laws and realized that he had anticipated them.
Read More...
Laptop

'Clickjacking' worm hits hundreds of thousands on Facebook

Dan Goodin
The Register
Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:16 UTC
'This girl gets OWNED.' And you can too

A vulnerability on Facebook forced hundreds of thousands of users to endorse a series of webpages over the holiday weekend, making the social networking site the latest venue for an attack known as clickjacking.

The exploit works by presenting people with friend profiles that recommend - or "Like," in Facebook parlance - links with titles including "LOL This girl gets OWNED after a POLICE OFFICER reads her STATUS MESSAGE." Those who click on the link see a page that's blank except for the words "Click here to continue." Clicking anywhere on the page automatically forces the person to add the link to his list of Likes.
Read More...
Laptop

Mass Market Web Scams Raking in Billions

Phil Muncaster
V3 UK
Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:12 UTC
Image
© V3.co.ukUK citizens lose an estimated £3.5bn every year to mass market fraud
Serious Organised Crime Agency launches global day of action to raise awareness

The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) has warned that mass market fraud campaigns are robbing UK internet users of billions of pounds a year.

Organisations in the UK, including Soca, the National Fraud Authority, the Office of Fair Trading and the Metropolitan Police, have today joined forces with others worldwide in an attempt to raise public awareness about the scams and the cyber criminals behind them.
Read More...