Science & TechnologyS


Gear

Forget the meltdown, worry about goo and asteroids

John Kay
The Financial Times
Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:13 UTC
Last week was the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska explosion in Siberia. If you weren't celebrating, you should have been. The incident was probably the nearest we have come to extinction in modern human history - and we survived.

A large object - presumably an asteroid or meteorite - collided with the Earth. If it had landed in Manhattan, it would have destroyed New York. A bit bigger, and it would have been calamitous wherever it landed. A similar event at Yucatan, 65m years ago, wiped out the dinosaurs and most other species. It would have wiped us out too had we been there. We survived Tunguska because the impact was not too large.

Comment: Maybe the current financial crisis is manufactured in order to focus people's attention on "down to Earth" matters and away from the sky, where a greater threat lurks?

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Bulb

Flashback A temple to mystery and imagination

Johnathan Glancey
The Guardian
Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:02 UTC
Many of Cern's scientists are well aware of the connection between their great underground temple and those of religions, ancient and modern. And, just as the quest for God, or the gods, encouraged the very first great works of architecture, so Cern, laid out up to 100 metres below ground like some inverted, latter day Stonehenge, has been constructed on a massive scale.
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Binoculars

Scientists ponder future Moon mission activities

Austin Modine
The Register
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:07 UTC
A clever fellow once observed that the Moon is a harsh mistress. Humanity's subsequent jaunts up to the place indicated it was a pretty solid hypothesis. The Ritz-Carlton it is not.

Now NASA has the vision of not only returning astronauts back to the orbital dustball in 2020, but establishing a long-term moon base there. Needless to say, there's plenty of arrangements to be made before the moonbuggy pulls into 555 South Pole-Aitken Basin Avenue.

That's why nearly 500 scientists and amateur lunar lovers from gave gathered for an Earth-side conference this week at NASA/Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The first annual Lunar Science Conference aims to discuss what kind of science should be done for our species' return to the moon.
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Bug

Unknown insects found in 110-million-year-old amber in Spain


Agence France-Presse
Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:49 UTC
The remains of several unknown insect species which became extinct long before dinosaurs stopped roaming the earth have been discovered in pieces of 110-million-year-old amber found in Spain, researchers said Thursday.

Palaeontologist Enrique Penalver said the amber discovered in the El Soplao cave in the northern province of Cantabria was in "exceptional" condition.

Image
©AFP
This undated photo shows an insect enclosed in an amber discovered by scientists of the Universities of Jena and Rostock in 2005. The remains of several unknown insect species which became extinct long before dinosaurs stopped roaming the earth have been discovered in pieces of 110-million-year-old amber found in Spain, researchers said Thursday.
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Telescope

Quiet Explosion: Object Intermediate Between Normal Supernovae And Gamma-ray Bursts Found


Science Daily
Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:16 UTC
A European-led team of astronomers are providing hints that a recent supernova may not be as normal as initially thought. Instead, the star that exploded is now understood to have collapsed into a black hole, producing a weak jet, typical of much more violent events, the so-called gamma-ray bursts.

Image
©ESO
The spiral galaxy NGC 2770 and its two supernovae as observed at the Asiago Observatory. The image was obtained on 12 January 2008 and shows the then fading SN 2007uy and the newly discovered SN 2008D.

The object, SN 2008D, is thus probably among the weakest explosions that produce very fast moving jets. This discovery represents a crucial milestone in the understanding of the most violent phenomena observed in the Universe.

These striking results, partly based on observations with ESO's Very Large Telescope, will appear tomorrow in Science Express, the online version of Science.

Stars that were at birth more massive than about 8 times the mass of our Sun end their relatively short life in a cosmic, cataclysmic firework lighting up the Universe. The outcome is the formation of the densest objects that exist, neutron stars and black holes. When exploding, some of the most massive stars emit a short cry of agony, in the form of a burst of very energetic light, X- or gamma-rays.
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Info

Scientists Solve 30-year-old Aurora Borealis Mystery


Science Daily
Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:08 UTC
What causes the shimmering, ethereal Northern Lights to suddenly brighten and dance in a spectacular burst of colorful light and rapid movement?

Image
©NASA
Artist's concept of a substorm.

UCLA space scientists and colleagues have identified the mechanism that triggers substorms in space; wreaks havoc on satellites, power grids and communications systems; and leads to the explosive release of energy that causes the spectacular brightening of the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights.

For 30 years, there have been two competing theories to explain the onset of these substorms, which are energy releases in the Earth's magnetosphere, said Vassilis Angelopoulos, a UCLA professor of Earth and space sciences and principal investigator of the NASA-funded mission known as THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms).

One theory is that the trigger happens relatively close to Earth, about one-sixth of the distance to the moon. According to this theory, large currents building up in the space environment, which is composed of charged ions and electrons, or "plasma," are suddenly released by an explosive instability. The plasma implodes toward Earth as the space currents are disrupted, which is the start of the substorm.
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Target

Siberia forest blast captivates Wollongong scientist

Brett Cox
Illawarra Mercury News
Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:39 UTC
It's a question that has had scientists arguing for 100 years.

Now, after many came together for conferences a century after the "Tunguska Event" in a Siberian Forest, the arguments continue.

On June 30, 1908, a blast, hundreds of times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb, destroyed about 2000sq km of forest but left no obvious crater.

Image
©Illawarra Mercury News
Wollongong academic Ted Bryant at the Tunguska site.
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Evil Rays

Hang up and drive. Dissociation the biggest risk with cellphones and driving

Katharine Mieszkowski
Salon
Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:13 UTC
For years, psychologists who study driving and attention have argued that switching to "hands free" is not a real solution to the hazards caused by yakking on the mobile in the car. "The impairments aren't because your hands aren't on the wheel. It's because your mind isn't the road," says David Strayer, professor of psychology at the University of Utah, whose research has found driving while talking on a cellphone to be as dangerous as driving drunk.
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Fish

Exploration of underwater forest


BBC News
Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:20 UTC
Underwater archaeologists are taking to Loch Tay to try to uncover more about a submerged prehistoric woodland.

Tree Stump 4270 BC
©Unknown
One of the tree stumps could date back to 4,270 BC
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Frog

Human-Frog hybrids used to study autism


Asian News International
Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:28 UTC
Scientists at the University of California at Irvine are studying the way the brain cells of among autistic people behave by fusing cells from the preserved brains of deceased patients with the eggs of a carnivorous African frog called Xenopus.

The researchers say that frog eggs work a little like human neurons, and that the hybrid cells act as a surrogate of a living brain with the condition.
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