Science & Technology

Rare Sight: Giant Black Hole Devours Star, Fires Beams at Earth

Space
Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00 UTC

© NASA/Swift/Stefan Immier
Images from NASA's Swift satellite were combined in this UV/optical/X-ray view of the explosion, which is known as GRB 110328A. The blast was detected in X-rays, which were collected on March 28.

A powerful beam of energy has been spotted blasting out from the center of a massive black hole as it rips apart and devours a star in a rare sight that astronomers say likely happens only once every 100 million years, a new study finds.

When a NASA satellite first detected the intensely bright flash deep in the cosmos, astronomers initially thought it was a powerful burst of gamma rays from a collapsing star, one of the most powerful types of explosions in the universe. But, when the tremendous amount of energy could still be seen months later, they realized something more mysterious was going on.

"This is a really, really unusual event," study co-author Joshua Bloom,assistant professor of Astronomy at University of California, Berkeley, told SPACE.com. "It's now about two-and-a-half months old, and the fact that it just continues on and is only fading very slowly is the one really big piece of evidence that tells us this is not an ordinary gamma-ray burst."

Steak Made from Human Excrement: Is It Safe?

Rachael Rettner
Live Science
Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00 UTC

The mere idea is stomach-churning: creating food from human feces.

But researchers in Japan say they have done just that. They have synthesized meat from proteins found in human waste, according to news reports.

While the concept of chowing down on steak derived from poop may not exactly be appetizing, we wondered: is this meat safe?

In theory, yes, experts say. But the meat must be cooked, which will kill any noxious pathogens before you eat it.

"In the food safety world we say, 'don't eat poop,'" said Douglas Powell, a professor of food safety at Kansas State University. "But if you're going to, make sure it's cooked."

The Japanese researchers isolated proteins from bacteria in sewage. The poop-meat concoction is prepared by extracting the basic elements of food - protein, carbohydrates and fats - and recombining them.

How the Brain Recognizes Its Body

Dani Cooper
ABC News Online, Australia
Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:31 UTC

The mystery of how the brain develops the sense of ownership that recognises our body belongs to us is a step closer to being solved.

Australian researchers have shown that along with the sense of touch and vision, signalling receptors in the muscles and joints also play a critical role.

The finding, published recently in the Journal of Physiology, will help in designing treatments for disorders of body ownership that can occur with conditions such as stroke and epilepsy.

Lead author Dr Lee Walsh, of Neuroscience Research Australia, says we instinctively know our body parts "belong" to us.

However, he says, how the brain develops that map of what belongs to it is still in part unknown.

"How do I know my hand is mine and not yours and that the telephone is not a part of my body," he says.

Previous research shows people can be deluded into claiming ownership of an artificial hand, Walsh says.This is done by simultaneously stroking the subject's hidden hand and a visible artificial rubber hand.

"Once the illusion of ownership of the hand is established, subjects have physiological responses to threats made against the rubber hand," Walsh and his colleagues write in the paper.

Walsh says however, in this study the team was interested to see if other sensory channels could also be important in developing body ownership.

New Rocketplane Could Fly Paris-Tokyo in 2.5 Hours

Agence France-Presse
Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:23 UTC

European aerospace giant EADS on Sunday unveiled its "Zero Emission Hypersonic Transportation" (Zehst) rocket plane it hopes will be able to fly from Paris to Tokyo in 2.5 hours by around 2050.

"I imagine the plane of the future to look like Zehst," EADS' chief technical officer Jean Botti said as the project was announced at Le Bourget airport the day before the start of the Paris International Air Show.

The low-pollution plane to carry between 50 and 100 passengers will take off using normal engines powered by biofuel made from seaweed before switching on its rocket engines at altitude.

Hello, Helene!

Jason Major
Universe Today
Mon, 20 Jun 2011 12:59 UTC

On June 18, 2011, the Cassini spacecraft performed a flyby of Saturn's moon Helene. Passing at a distance of 6,968 km (4,330 miles) it was Cassini's second-closest flyby of the icy little moon.

The image above is a color composite made from raw images taken with Cassini's red, green and blue visible light filters. There's a bit of a blur because the moon shifted position in the frames slightly between images, but I think it captures some of the subtle color variations of lighting and surface composition very nicely!

Below is a 3D anaglyph view of Helene made from the recent raw images by Patrick Rutherford... if you have a pair of red/blue glasses, check it out!

Panama Canal, Panama City at Risk of Large Earthquake, Says New Research

Science Daily
Sun, 19 Jun 2011 12:47 UTC

New data suggest that the Limon and Pedro Miguel faults in Central Panama have ruptured both independently and in unison over the past 1400 years, indicating a significant seismic risk for Panama City and the Panama Canal, according to research published November 18 by the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA).

The Panama Canal is undergoing expansion to allow for greater traffic of larger ships, scheduled for completion by 2014. As part of a seismic hazard characterization for the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) expansion project, Rockwell, et al., studied the geologic and geomorphic expression of the Pedro Miguel, Limon, and related faults, followed by an in-depth study into their earthquake and displacement history, critical factors in the design of the Panama Canal new locks and associated structures.

"The Pedro Miguel fault actually runs between the existing Pacific locks -- the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores locks -- and last ruptured in a large earthquake in 1621," said lead author Thomas K. Rockwell, professor of geology at San Diego State University. "That earthquake resulted in nearly 10 feet of displacement where the fault crosses the canal, and a similar amount of offset of the historical Camino de Cruces, the old Spanish cobblestone road that was used to haul South American gold across the isthmus. Another such earthquake today could have dramatic effects."

Mysterious Changing Neutrinos could explain why we don't live in an Antimatter Universe

Alasdair Wilkins
io9.com
Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:32 UTC

There's nothing in the laws of physics that actually requires matter to dominate antimatter, and yet all our observations of the universe suggest that that's the case. But some unexpected behavior by ghostly neutrino particles could solve the antimatter mystery.

The T2K project in Japan is one of the world's foremost neutrino detectors, and it appears to be on the verge of a crucial discovery. However, these experiments have been on hold since the earthquake in March, so the results have to remain provisional until the work can start back up again.

Sun Has Giant Supersonic Waves Bigger Than Earth

Fox News
Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00 UTC

© NASA/SDO/Astrophysical Journal Letters
Surfer waves -- initiated in the sun, as they are in the water, by a process called a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability -- have been found in the sun's atmosphere.

Humongous waves of hot plasma roiling on the surface of the sun appear to be moving at speeds as high as 4.5 million miles per hour, a new study found. The waves are so huge it would take up to 16 Earths, end-to-end, to match them.

It's the first unambiguous evidence that the sun's lower atmosphere contains such superfast "magnetosonic waves," scientists said.

The fast waves have velocities of 2.3 million to 4.5 million mph (1,000 to 2,000 kilometers per second), periods in the range of 30 to 200 seconds, and wavelengths of 62,000 to 124,000 miles (100,000 to 200,000 kilometers), equivalent to stacking between eight to 16 Earths on top of one another.

Scientists discovered the waves with the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly instrument on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), dedicated to observing the sun from orbit around Earth.

Electric Universe: Bubbling Plasma

Stephen Smith
thunderbolts.info
Fri, 17 Jun 2011 21:50 UTC

Enceladus joins other celestial objects that produce "magnetic bubbles."

In a recent Picture of the Day, the so-called "bubbles" of magnetism supposedly found by the Voyager spacecraft at the boundary where the Sun's heliosphere meets the ISM (interstellar medium) were explained as Langmuir sheaths, or electrically charged double layers in plasma. Since the bubbles are thought to be elongated, it was suggested that the electron flux variations detected by the twin Voyagers probably indicate filaments of electricity called Birkeland currents.

Similar electromagnetic structures are seen around Earth, on Venus, on the various gas giant planets, and within and surrounding galaxies. All of these phenomena share a common characteristic: they are all manifestations of electricity flowing through plasma.

Lierre Keith on 'The Vegetarian Myth - Food, Justice and Sustainability'

P-Span
YouTube
Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:11 UTC

We've been told that a vegetarian diet can feed the hungry, honor the animals, and save the planet. Lierre Keith believed in that plant-based diet and spent twenty years as a vegan. But in The Vegetarian Myth, she argues that we've been led astray--not by our longings for a just and sustainable world, but by our ignorance.

The truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet, and more of the same won't save us. In service to annual grains, humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil--the basis of life itself. Keith argues that if we are to save this planet, our food must be an act of profound and abiding repair: it must come from inside living communities, not be imposed across them.

Part memoir, part nutritional primer, and part political manifesto, The Vegetarian Myth will challenge everything you thought you knew about food politics.

Part 1