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Monster supernovae may explain Milky Way's mystery haze of radiation


New Scientist
Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:10 UTC
What is causing a mysterious "haze" of radiation at the centre of the Milky Way? It may be a load of monster supernovae kicking out radiation which is then amplified by magnetic stellar winds and turbulence near the galaxy's core.

Image
© X-ray (NASA/CXC/NCSU/S.Reynolds et al.); Radio (NSF/NRAO/VLA/Cambridge/D.Green et al.); Infrared (2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF/CfA/E.Bressert
Supernovae such as G1.9+0.3, at the centre of the Milky Way could be responsible for the unexplained "WMAP haze"
In 2003, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe found a patch of particularly energetic microwave radiation in the centre of our galaxy - dubbed the "WMAP haze". It was proposed that this could be caused by collisions of a new type of dark-matter particle.

Instead, the signal could be produced by amplified cosmic rays generated when particularly large stars explode, says Peter Biermann of the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn, Germany, and colleagues.

Image
© WMAP
The mysterious WMAP haze
The centre of our galaxy has a high number of massive stars compared with elsewhere. These stars are surrounded by particularly strong magnetic stellar winds. At the star's polar regions, the wind's magnetic field is parallel to the direction of travel of any escaping cosmic rays kicked out by the supernova. This configuration - plus the particularly high turbulence in the galactic centre caused by the high concentration of stars - may be increasing the energy of the cosmic rays, says the team. They have submitted the paper to The Astrophysical Journal.
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10,000-year-old flint found on Coventry allotment

Helen Thomas
Coventry Telegraph News
Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:07 UTC
Budding archaeologist Samuel Owens uncovered a 10,000 year old piece of history when he found a segment of flint in his dad's allotment.

The piece has now been identified as coming from the Mesolithic era and is believed to have been used as a type of sharp weapon, possibly for spearing fish.

Samuel, 11, and a pupil at President Kennedy School, had been out with his dad at their allotment in Watery Lane, Keresley, when they made the discovery.

"I just saw it sticking out of the ground when my dad was digging.
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Augmented reality system lets you see through walls

Jim Giles
New Scientist
Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:50 UTC
If only drivers could see through walls, blind corners and other dangerous road junctions would be much safer. Now an augmented reality system has been built that could just make that come true

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Mystery stone found near church linked to Knights Templar

Claire Smith
NEWS.scotsman.com
Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:44 UTC
Image
© Kate Chandler
The stone has been dated to the 12th century.
A mysterious carved stone has been uncovered alongside a 12th-century church associated with the Knights Templar.

What appears to be the carved top of a sarcophagus was unearthed when builders were excavating and reinforcing a wall alongside the old ruined church in Temple, Midlothian.

But the inscriptions, which include symbols similar to those found in Viking monuments, in medieval graves and in West Highland Celtic carvings, have baffled archaeologists.
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Novel Evolutionary Theory For The Explosion Of Life


Science Daily
Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:46 UTC
The Cambrian Explosion is widely regarded as one of the most relevant episodes in the history of life on Earth, when the vast majority of animal phyla first appear in the fossil record. However, the causes of its origin have been the subject of debate for decades, and the question of what was the trigger for the single cell microorganisms to assemble and organize into multicellular organisms has remained unanswered until now.

Within a longstanding research collaboration between the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia and Bielefeld University together with the Friedrich-Miescher-Institute in Basel and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole (Massachusetts), Xavier Fernàndez-Busquets (Barcelona) and Dario Anselmetti (Bielefeld) and their colleagues published online in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution their biophysical single molecule results on the effect of calcium on the interactions of cell adhesion molecules from marine sponges.

These simply organized organisms do not have specialized muscle or nerve cells and nevertheless survived the last 500 million years almost unchanged and are considered a link between the single-cell dominated Precambrian and later multicellular organisms.
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Info

New look for antiques

Piero Baglioni
Wiley-Blackwell
Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:36 UTC
Image
© Wiley-VCH 2009
Oil-in-water nanocontainers within an aqueous polymer network were effective for the low-impact selective cleaning of painted and gilded surfaces. Interactions with the polymer (black in the schematic illustration) did not alter the structure of the microemulsion nanodroplets (light blue and red) significantly. A photograph of an equilibrated mixture of the microemulsion and the polymer is shown.
In the past, restoration of paintings and other old artwork often involved application of acrylic resins to consolidate and protect them. One of the most important tasks for modern restorers is thus to remove these layers, because it turns out that acrylic resins not only drastically change the optics of the treated artwork, but in many cases they accelerate their degradation. Italian researchers working with Piero Baglioni at the University of Florence have now developed a technique to effectively remove such old polymer layers from sensitive historic artworks. As the researchers report in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the new cleaning system involves only a tiny proportion of volatile organic compounds.

"We have demonstrated the first successful application of a water-based system for the removal of an organic layer from artwork," says Baglioni. "In addition, our method is simpler and less invasive than traditional processes."
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Sun

The Sun's Sneaky Variability

Dr. Tony Phillips
SPX / NASA
Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:22 UTC
Image
© SOHO
The active sun photographed at EUV wavelengths by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory in the year 2000.
Every 11 years, the sun undergoes a furious upheaval. Dark sunspots burst forth from beneath the sun's surface. Explosions as powerful as a billion atomic bombs spark intense flares of high-energy radiation. Clouds of gas big enough to swallow planets break away from the sun and billow into space. It's a flamboyant display of stellar power.

So why can't we see any of it? Almost none of the drama of Solar Maximum is visible to the human eye. Look at the sun in the noontime sky and-ho-hum-it's the same old bland ball of bright light.

"The problem is, human eyes are tuned to the wrong wavelength," explains Tom Woods, a solar physicist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "If you want to get a good look at solar activity, you need to look in the EUV."

EUV is short for "extreme ultraviolet," a high-energy form of ultraviolet radiation with wavelengths between 1 and 120 nanometers. EUV photons are much more energetic and dangerous than the ordinary UV rays that cause sunburns. Fortunately for humans, Earth's atmosphere blocks solar EUV; otherwise a day at the beach could be fatal.
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World's Fastest Supercomputer Models Origins Of The Unseen Universe


Space Daily / SPX
Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:02 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The Roadrunner Universe model relies on a hierarchical grid/particle algorithm that best matches the physical aspects of the simulation to the hybrid architecture of Roadrunner. Habib and his team wrote an entirely new computer code that aggressively exploits Roadrunner's hybrid architecture and makes full use of the PowerXCell 8i computational accelerators.
Understanding dark energy is the number one issue in explaining the universe, according to Salman Habib, of the Laboratory's Nuclear and Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology group.

"Because the universe is expanding and at the same time accelerating, either there is a huge gap in our understanding of physics, or there is a strange new form of matter that dominates the universe - 'dark energy' - making up about 70 percent of it," said Habib.

"In addition, there is five times more of an unknown 'dark matter' than there is ordinary matter in the universe, and we know it's there from many different observations, most spectacularly, we've seen it bend light in pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, but its origin is also not understood."
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Meteor

Asteroid blast reveals holes in Earth's defences

David Shiga
New Scientist
Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:04 UTC
As the US government ponders a strategy to deal with threatening asteroids, a dramatic explosion over Indonesia has underscored how blind we still are to hurtling space rocks.

On 8 October an asteroid detonated high in the atmosphere above South Sulawesi, Indonesia, releasing about as much energy as 50,000 tons of TNT, according to a NASA estimate released on Friday. That's about three times more powerful than the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima, making it one of the largest asteroid explosions ever observed.

However, the blast caused no damage on the ground because of the high altitude, 15 to 20 kilometres above Earth's surface, says astronomer Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario (UWO), Canada.

Brown and Elizabeth Silber, also of UWO, estimated the explosion energy from infrasound waves that rippled halfway around the world and were recorded by an international network of instruments that listens for nuclear explosions.
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German Archaeologist: Beneath Every Footstep in Syria is an Ancient Civilization

H. Sabbagh / Kh. Aridi
Global Arab Network
Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:10 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Syria, the land of civilizations and history, is rife with ancient monuments that tell the stories of the many peoples and civilizations that lived in it, whose stories endured in the face of time to tell humanity about their greatness.

"Beneath every footstep in Syria is an ancient civilization," says Archaeologist Markus Gschwind, head of the Syrian-German Archaeology Expedition working at al-Rafina in Hama. He notes that this saying is repeated around Germany, as most Germans consider Syria the most historically deep-rooted country in the Mediterranean.

In a statement to SANA, Gschwind said that he has been living and excavating in Syria for six years, each day discovering many secrets from the history of mankind.
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