Science & TechnologyS


Sun

Big Sunspot with Magnetic Canopy Emerging

Readers with solar telescopes, train your optics on the sun's northeastern limb. A big sunspot with an active magnetic canopy is emerging there. And that's not all...

Today around 1200 UT, magnetic fields looping over the sun's southeastern limb became unstable and erupted. The blast produced a towering prominence dozens of times taller than Earth itself:

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© David Evans
David Evans took the picture from his backyard observatory in Coleshill, North Warwickshire, UK. "This was a huge event," he says. "It just goes to show how the sun can surprise observers even at this 'low' phase of the solar cycle."

Magnet

Spacequakes Rumble Near Earth

Rumbles without sound
Auroras rain down
Magnetic fields shake
Beware the spacequake


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Click to launch a computer-simulated movie created by Walt Feimer of Goddard's Scientific Visualization Lab.
Researchers using NASA's fleet of five THEMIS spacecraft have discovered a form of space weather that packs the punch of an earthquake and plays a key role in sparking bright Northern Lights. They call it "the spacequake."

A spacequake is a temblor in Earth's magnetic field. It is felt most strongly in Earth orbit, but is not exclusive to space. The effects can reach all the way down to the surface of Earth itself.

"Magnetic reverberations have been detected at ground stations all around the globe, much like seismic detectors measure a large earthquake," says THEMIS principal investigator Vassilis Angelopoulos of UCLA.

It's an apt analogy because "the total energy in a spacequake can rival that of a magnitude 5 or 6 earthquake," according to Evgeny Panov of the Space Research Institute in Austria. Panov is first author of a paper reporting the results in the April 2010 issue of Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).

Info

Researchers Find Wine, Sake Turns Iron Compound Superconductive

Tsukuba, Japan (Kyodo) -- Researchers at the National Institute for Materials Science have found that an iron compound become superconductive, where electrical resistance disappears in a substance, if they are dipped in wine, sake or beer, the institute said Tuesday.

"It is still not known what it is in sake that is the cause (of the phenomenon) but it will provide a clue to the development of new superconductive materials," said Yoshihiko Takano, leader of the Nano Frontier Materials Group at the institute.

The researchers said they first produced an iron telluride compound, which has a similar structure to a superconductive substance. It did not show signs of superconductivity immediately but was found to when it was re-examined after being left on a desk for about one week.

Assuming that the change was due to moisture in the air, the researchers experimented with water, ethanol and other substances at different temperatures and in varying concentrations but could not attain results showing high conductivity.

Magnify

An Ancient Subterranean Secret Complex Discovered in Hamadan Province

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© Unknown
An ancient network of secret tunnels and dwellings has been discovered in Hamedan Province.The Iranian province lies in an elevated region, with the 'Alvand' mountains, running from the north west to the south west.

The discovered complex is located near the village of Arzanfud, 25 kilometres southeast of the provincial capital-city of Hamedan, the Hamedan Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Department (HCHTHD) announced Saturday in a press release.

The complex is believed to have been used by habitants as a shelter during wars.

The entrance to the subterranean complex which is hidden or disguised yet to be discovered, but at the moment it is accessible through an original ventilation shaft, widened by HCHTHD's experts for access.

Display

Data Sorting World Record Falls as Computer Scientists Break Terabyte Sort Barrier

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© UnknownTo break the terabyte barrier for the Indy Minute Sort, the computer science researchers built a system made up of 52 computer nodes. Each node is a commodity server with two quad-core processors, 24 gigabytes (GB) memory and sixteen 500 GB disks – all inter-connected by a Cisco Nexus 5020 switch. Cisco donated the switches as a part of their research engagement with the UC San Diego Center for Networked Systems. The compute cluster is hosted at Calit2
Computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego broke "the terabyte barrier" - and a world record - when they sorted more than one terabyte of data (1,000 gigabytes or 1 million megabytes) in just 60 seconds. During this 2010 "Sort Benchmark" competition - the "World Cup of data sorting" - the computer scientists from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering also tied a world record for fastest data sorting rate. They sorted one trillion data records in 172 minutes - and did so using just a quarter of the computing resources of the other record holder.

Display

Facebook Testing New Account Deletion Feature

The infamously difficult process of truly getting a Facebook account deleted may be a thing of the past if a new Facebook test goes well. The social network is testing a feature that will permanently delete an account with just a few clicks.

Camera

NASA Unveils Global Martian Map

Odyssey view offers plenty of detail, but no roadsigns

NASA has unveiled "the most accurate global Martian map ever" - a 21,000 image mosaic from the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) aboard its Mars Odyssey spacecraft.

According to the agency, the snaps have been "smoothed, matched, blended and cartographically controlled" to produce the final result, which at full zoom dishes up details as small as 100 meters.

Philip Christensen, principal investigator for THEMIS and director of the Mars Space Flight Facility, explained: "We've tied the images to the cartographic control grid provided by the U.S. Geological Survey, which also modeled the THEMIS camera's optics. This approach lets us remove all instrument distortion, so features on the ground are correctly located to within a few pixels and provide the best global map of Mars to date."

Pills

Mrs Brin's Medicine Show deceived customers, says report

DNA tests: new century, new snake oil

Companies selling DNA kits have been deceiving customers with "fictitious" and "misleading" medical advice, an undercover sting operation by Congressional watchdog the GAO has discovered. One of the companies, 23andMe, was co-founded by Mrs Sergey Brin - Anne Wojowcki - and boasts veteran Silicon Valley socialite Esther Dyson as a director. All the companies investigated have been referred to the Food and Drugs Administration and the Federal Trade Commission for "appropriate action".

The GAO investigation [summary - text] titled Direct-To-Consumer Genetic Tests: Misleading Test Results Are Further Complicated by Deceptive Marketing and Other Questionable Practices sent DNA samples to four companies, and followed up with undercover calls for medical advice.

Nuke

Uranium Is Getting Some Glowing Reviews On Amazon

amazon uranium
© TechCrunch

Did you know you can buy uranium ore on Amazon? Well you can. It's actually been on sale for a while - BoingBoing pointed it out back in 2007. But talk of it has recently started popping up around the Internet once again this past week. Our sister site CrunchGear did a quick post pointing it out last week. Since then, a whole new batch of great customer reviews have been flowing in, as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels points out today.

Some of the negative reviews note that uranium is "bad for you." Another says that it killed a pet gorilla. But some positive reviews mark is as a "great gift for a hostile dictator."

Info

Ancient skull suggests head reshaping practice

Eleven thousand years ago a tall and solidly built Aboriginal man lived a hard life. His bones reveal he had multiple breaks in both forearms, a fractured ankle so severe his shin bones fused together and arthritis in his jaw.

''Death might have been something to look forward to for him,'' palaeoanthropologist Peter Brown said.

But since his skeleton, known as Nacurrie, was discovered in 1948, near Swan Hill on the Murray River, it has been the changes to his skull that have been of most interest to Professor Brown