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African rocks record ancient magnetic field

Jonathan Amos
British Broadcasting Corporation
Tue, 04 May 2010 18:58 UTC
Image

More auroras would have been seen at lower latitudes
Scientists have managed to push back the date for the earliest known presence of a magnetic field on Earth by about 250 million years.

The evidence is seen in tiny iron minerals that are aligned inside ancient dacite rocks from the Barberton mountains in South Africa.

Analysis of the 3.45-billion-year-old minerals indicates the strength the field was much weaker than today.

Earth's magnetic field protects all life on the planet.

It forms a shield that deflects harmful particles from the Sun around our world, and limits the ability of this "solar wind" to erode our atmosphere.
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Magnify

Maya plumbing, first pressurized water feature found in New World


Pennsylvania State University
Tue, 04 May 2010 18:44 UTC
Image
© Kirk French; Penn State
Interior of the Piedras Bolas aqueduct showing the abrupt reduction in conduit size near the exit.
A water feature found in the Maya city of Palenque, Mexico, is the earliest known example of engineered water pressure in the new world, according to a collaboration between two Penn State researchers, an archaeologist and a hydrologist. How the Maya used the pressurized water is, however, still unknown.

"Water pressure systems were previously thought to have entered the New World with the arrival of the Spanish," the researchers said in a recent issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. "Yet, archaeological data, seasonal climate conditions, geomorphic setting and simple hydraulic theory clearly show that the Maya of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, had empirical knowledge of closed channel water pressure predating the arrival of Europeans."
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Pharoah

Headless Statue of Ancient Egyptian King‎ Unearthed

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News
Tue, 04 May 2010 18:39 UTC
Image
© Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquites (SCA).
A headless granite statue of a Ptolemaic king has emerged from the ruins of an ancient Egyptian limestone temple believed to be the burial site of Queen Cleopatra and her lover Mark Antony.

According to a statement issued on Tuesday by the Supreme Council of Antiquities, the sculpture was unearthed at Taposiris Magna, a site some 30 miles from the port city of Alexandria, by an Egyptian-Dominican team searching for the tomb of the doomed lovers.
      Read More...
Camera

Omni-focus video camera to revolutionize industry

Mario Pidutti
University of Toronto
Tue, 04 May 2010 18:32 UTC
Image
© University of Toronto
The resulting image shown in Figure 1a (taken with a prototype using two-color video cameras) clearly demonstrates how the omni-focused output dramatically differs from that of a conventional camera, shown in Figure 1b. Note that in the omni-focused image, the fingers in the foreground are so sharply focused that even the fingerprints are easily recognized.
University of Toronto, a world-leading research university, announces a breakthrough development in video camera design. The Omni-focus Video Camera, based on an entirely new distance-mapping principle, delivers automatic real-time focus of both near and far field images, simultaneously, in high resolution. This unprecedented capability can be broadly applied in industry, including manufacturing, medicine, defense, security -- and for the consumer market.
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Bulb

Improbable research: The repetitive physics of Om

Marc Abrahams
The Guardian
Mon, 03 May 2010 18:41 UTC
Image
Indian scientists wield sophisticated mathematics to dissect and analyse the traditional meditation chanting sound 'Om'

Two Indian scientists are wielding sophisticated mathematics to dissect and analyse the traditional meditation chanting sound "Om". The Om team has published six monographs in academic journals. These plumb certain acoustic subtleties of Om, which these researchers say is "the divine sound".

Om has many variations. In a study published in the International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security, the researchers explain: "It may be very fast, several cycles per second. Or it may be slower, several seconds for each cycling of [the] Om mantra. Or it might become extremely slow, with the mmmmmm sound continuing in the mind for much longer periods but still pulsing at that slow rate. It is somewhat like one of these vibrations:
'OMmmOMmmOMmm...

'OMmmmmOMmmmmOMmmmm...

'OMmmmmmmmOMmmmmmmmOMmm'."
The important technical fact is that no matter what form of Om one chants at whatever speed, there is always a basic Omness to it.
      Read More...
Telescope

How to Measure Distances in the Night Sky

Joe Rao
Space.com
Mon, 03 May 2010 17:08 UTC
Image
© unknown
Sometimes, the apparent distance between two celestial objects - the distance we can actually see on the sky - is indicated in terms of angular degrees. But these descriptions can seem like a foreign language to folks who don't pore over star charts every day, so here's a handy primer.

If we measured the distance around the circle of the entire horizon - from north all the way around through east and south and west and back to north again - that would equal 360-degrees.

From the horizon to the point directly overhead (the zenith) would equal 90-degrees; from one horizon point through the zenith and continuing across to the opposite side of the sky would measure 180-degrees.
      Read More...
Telescope

Astronomers Puzzled over Comet LINEAR's Missing Pieces


3dastronomer.com
Mon, 03 May 2010 15:12 UTC
Image
© unk.
Astronomers analyzing debris from a comet that broke apart last summer spied pieces as small as smoke-sized particles and as large as football-field-sized fragments. But it's the material they didn't see that has aroused their curiosity.

Tracking the doomed comet, named LINEAR, the Hubble telescope and the Very Large Telescope in Chile found tiny particles that made up the 2,000-mile-long dust tail and 16 large fragments, some as wide as 330 feet. But the telescopes didn't detect any intermediate-sized pieces. If they exist, then the fundamental building blocks that comprised LINEAR's nucleus may be somewhat smaller than current theories suggest.

The Hubble picture shows that that LINEAR's nucleus has been reduced to a shower of glowing "mini-comets" resembling the fiery fragments from an exploding aerial firework. This picture was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on August 5, 2000, when the comet was at a distance of 64 million miles (102 million kilometers) from Earth.

Object Name:
Comet LINEAR
      Read More...
Sun

Auroras Invade the USA


Space Weather
Mon, 03 May 2010 15:14 UTC
A high-speed solar wind stream hit Earth's magnetic field last night, sparking a geomagnetic storm (Kp=5-6) that lasted more than 15 hours. Northern Lights spilled across the Canadian border and were spotted in several US states. Joseph Shaw sends this picture from Bozeman, Montana:

Image
© Joseph Shaw
"The red auroras were just visible to the naked eye and easily captured by my Nikon D300," says Shaw. "Excellent treat!"

NOAA forecasters estimate a 45% chance of continued geomagnetic activity over the next 24 hours. High-latitute sky watchers should remain alert for auroras.
      Read More...
Sherlock

Mammoths had 'Anti-Freeze Blood', Gene Study Finds

Paul Rincon
BBC News
Sun, 02 May 2010 15:58 UTC
Image
© unk.
The mutation may have helped mammoths survive in the Ice Age
Mammoths had a form of "anti-freeze" blood to keep their bodies supplied with oxygen at freezing temperatures.

Nature Genetics reports that scientists "resurrected" a woolly mammoth blood protein to come to their finding.

This protein, known as haemoglobin, is found in red blood cells, where it binds to and carries oxygen.

The team found that mammoths possessed a genetic adaptation allowing their haemoglobin to release oxygen into the body even at low temperatures.

The ability of haemoglobin to release oxygen to the body's tissues is generally inhibited by the cold.
      Read More...
Satellite

Laser creates clouds over Germany

Colin Barras
New Scientist
Sun, 02 May 2010 22:38 UTC
Image
© Jean-Pierre Wolf/University of Geneva
A laser pulse (red) ionises air and triggers the condensation of water droplets to create a cloud, which is illuminated by a second, green laser
A laser has been used to generate small clouds on demand in lab, and real-world experiments suggest this could be a way to call down rain when it's needed.

People have experimented with cloud seeding for decades in the hope of boosting rainfall, usually by sprinkling silver iodide crystals into clouds high in the atmosphere.

These crystals encourage large water droplets to form around them, and the droplets then fall as rain - in theory, at least. "The efficiency of this technique is controversial," says Jérôme Kasparian at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, one member of a research team that think lasers may be a better way to trigger rain on demand.

Kasparian and colleagues have just reported the first successful use of this technique to summon clouds from air both in the lab and in the skies over Berlin, Germany.
      Read More...
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