Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Celestial Triangle

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© tefano De Rosa
"Superbright Venus popped out of the twilight first, followed minutes later by Mars and Saturn," says De Rosa. "The sight of the lovely celestial triangle over the calm water of the lake was really great!"

The three planets will remain in triangular formation for many nights to come, only the angles will change. Keep an eye on the sunset! Sky maps: August 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

More triangle images: from Amirreza Kamkar of Qayen, Khorasan, Iran; from Gary A. Becker of Coopersburg, PA; from Stefano De Rosa of Viverone lake, Turin, Italy; from Richard Glenn of Gold Beach, Oregon; from Adrian New of San Antonio, Texas.

Magnet

1962 glass could be Corning's next bonanza seller

gorilla glass
© UnknownGorilla glass
An ultra-strong glass that has been looking for a purpose since its invention in 1962 is poised to become a multibillion-dollar bonanza for Corning Inc.

The 159-year-old glass pioneer is ramping up production of what it calls Gorilla glass, expecting it to be the hot new face of touch-screen tablets and high-end TVs.

Gorilla showed early promise in the '60s, but failed to find a commercial use, so it's been biding its time in a hilltop research lab for almost a half-century. It picked up its first customer in 2008 and has quickly become a $170 million a year business as a protective layer over the screens of 40 million-plus cell phones and other mobile devices.

Now, the latest trend in TVs could catapult it to a billion-dollar business: Frameless flat-screens that could be mistaken for chic glass artwork on a living-room wall.

Sherlock

7,000-Year-Old Village Found Near Bulgarian Town of Shoumen

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© The Sofia EchoShoumen
A settlement dating back about 7,000 years has been discovered by a hill near the village of Ivanovo, in Shoumen municipality, in eastern Bulgaria, Bulgarian National Television (BNT) reported on July 26 2010.

The settlement, 900 square miles in area, lies between two rivers on the south face of the hill. In spite of its natural defenses, the settlement was fortified with a defensive wall of "unusual shape", BNT said.

"The shape of the fortification was not circular or oval-like, which was typical for the time but an irregular pattern resembling an octagon," archaeologist Svetlana Venelinova said in a television interview for BNT.

Additionally, the entire settlement was encircled by a moat outside the fortification.

Sherlock

Ancient Stone Monument to Napi Discovered on Canadian Prairies

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© Meaghan PorterA map of the Napi effigy - it's about five meters by five meters in size and was created with rocks the size of a fist. You can see Napi's arms, legs, head, torso and genitalia. The dark coloured stones are ones that have been disturbed, moved from their original position. There is a depression in the torso area, as represented by the circle.
A stone effigy monument, in the shape of a Blackfoot creator god named Napi, has been discovered in southern Alberta - south of the Red Deer River near the hamlet of Finnegan.
One day Old Man determined that he would make a woman and a child; so he formed them both - the woman and the child, her son - of clay. After he had moulded the clay in human shape, he said to the clay, "You must be people" ...

They walked down to the river with their Maker, and then he told them that his name was Na'pi, - Old Man.
From Blackfoot Lodge Tales, George Grinnell, 1892.

The Blackfoot are a people that have inhabited the prairies since ancient times. The effigy dates to somewhere between AD 1000 and AD 1500. It would have been constructed before the time of European contact.

Napi is a deity credited with creating the Blackfoot people and the landscape they inhabit. "According to Blackfoot tradition he's like the creator," said archaeologist Meaghan Porter, who investigated the site.

She said that the image is "made out of rocks and it's in the outline of a man - it has arms and a torso, head and legs as well as genitalia." It's roughly five meters by five meters long. The rocks are about the size of a fist, they have a mix of black, grey and tan colours. Porter doesn't think these colours were chosen deliberately "I think that's just the rocks that were available," she said.

Arrow Up

Solving the 800-year mystery of Pisa's Leaning Tower

leaning tower Pisa
© Associated Press A view of Pisa's Piazza dei Miracoli (Miracles' square) with the famous leaning tower.
Professor John Burland has spent the last two decades striving to save - and understand - the Leaning Tower of Pisa. After defying gravity, Italian bureaucracy and accusations of corruption, it seems he's finally cracked the case.

All six donkeys were impeccably behaved. They'd been ridden into Pisa's main square, the Piazza dei Miracoli, last November by vexed vets from Pisa University and ceremoniously set down beneath its Leaning Tower. In protest at government cuts across Italian education, the profs duly gave an al fresco lecture on donkey anatomy to hundreds of bewildered tourists. Silvio Berlusconi's photo appeared on many a banner, beside the words 'The biggest ass of all'.

Such a display of faculty dissent would have been impossible a decade ago, when the area of piazza around the tower was completely cordoned off. It looked then more building site than World Heritage site and the howls of protest from local Pisans were far louder than a few braying donkeys.

From 1990 to 2001, the tower remained closed - many doubting it would ever reopen - as the International Committee for the Safeguard of the Leaning Tower strove to save it from collapse. Visitors to Pisa dropped off by 45 per cent.

'The street vendors were furious about lost trade and demanded the tower be reopened,' says John Burland, the only Brit on the 14-man committee. 'But it was close to toppling over. Without our intervention, any local storm or earth tremor could have finished it off.' Burland, 72, is emeritus professor of soil engineering at Imperial College London, his reverend-like humility belying the fact that he helped solve one of the most fascinating riddles in architectural history.

Telescope

Antarctica Experiment Discovers Puzzling Space Ray Pattern

cosmic ray map
© IceCube collaboration, UW-MadisonThis "skymap," generated in 2009 from data collected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, shows the relative intensity of cosmic rays directed toward the Earth's Southern Hemisphere. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and elsewhere identified an unusual pattern of cosmic rays, with an excess (warmer colors) detected in one part of the sky and a deficit (cooler colors) in another.
A puzzling pattern in the cosmic rays bombarding Earth from space has been discovered by an experiment buried deep under the ice of Antarctica.

Cosmic rays are highly energetic particles streaming in from space that are thought to originate in the distant remnants of dead stars.

But it turns out these particles are not arriving uniformly from all directions. The new study detected an overabundance of cosmic rays coming from one part of the sky, and a lack of cosmic rays coming from another.

This odd pattern was detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an experiment still under construction that is actually intended to detect other exotic particles called neutrinos. In fact, scientists have gone out of their way to try to block out all signals from cosmic rays in order to search for the highly elusive neutrinos, which are much harder to find.

Info

Big Bang Abandoned in New Model of the Universe

A new cosmology successfully explains the accelerating expansion of the universe without dark energy; but only if the universe has no beginning and no end.

Big Bang
© Technology Review
As one of the few astrophysical events that most people are familiar with, the Big Bang has a special place in our culture. And while there is scientific consensus that it is the best explanation for the origin of the Universe, the debate is far from closed. However, it's hard to find alternative models of the Universe without a beginning that are genuinely compelling.

That could change now with the fascinating work of Wun-Yi Shu at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Shu has developed an innovative new description of the Universe in which the roles of time space and mass are related in new kind of relativity.

Shu's idea is that time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other. In his formulation of the geometry of spacetime, the speed of light is simply the conversion factor between the two. Similarly, mass and length are interchangeable in a relationship in which the conversion factor depends on both the gravitational constant G and the speed of light, neither of which need be constant.

So as the Universe expands, mass and time are converted to length and space and vice versa as it contracts.

Robot

The Link Between War and Bioengineered Humans

Bioengineered
© Big Think

Bioengineered humans are people who have been biologically upgraded through machine implants, genetic manipulation and drugs. Together, they herald what is popularly known as the coming post-human or Human 2.0 era. Augmentation is any bodily intervention that enhances human function and was not initiated because of a pathological deficiency. The only area where elective augmentation is obvious in everyday life is in cosmetic surgery such as veneers and drugs that enhance human capability and endurance like Viagra.

Biomimicry and bio-enhancement are becoming far more sophisticated. Scientists can now grow new organs in the lab, for example, and 3D bioprinters where they can be printed are being developed by companies like Organovo. However, the incentive to augment the physical strength of the human body is something that most of us don't care about deeply on a daily basis. "I don't need to run faster. I have a car," said a friend when we proposed the advantages of having a robotic foot. Running faster, X-ray vision, hearing at frequencies that only wolves and dogs can hear, having photogenic memory: all this sounds good but none of us would spend the time or money to acquire them because the advantages are not immediately clear. Unlike plastic surgery, which makes us immediately more attractive to the opposite sex, it is unclear what a new kidney would afford me if my current one functions reasonably well.

Of course, there are a number of reasons why we would want to invest in bio-enhancements, such as living longer with loved ones and eliminating susceptibility to malaria in Africa. But the private sector will not pay for the high cost of research based on these lofty goals and the government is already crumbling under debt and budget constraints. Human 2.0 would likely be a pipe dream if it wasn't for one group which is always looking for a superior human: the army.

Gear

Have You Been Photoshopped?

In the second week of July, nearly 50 students in Tamil Nadu were caught submitting bogus marksheets for college admissions, blowing the lid off a coordinated, state-wide fake marksheet scam. The modus operandi of the forgers, it was discovered, involved the simple use of blank marksheets pilfered from university offices, desktop scanners and a piece of software called Adobe Photoshop. A week later, halfway across the world, energy company BP Plc admitted after an online firestorm that it had digitally altered or "photoshopped" some of the images released to show the company's response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The landmark image editing program celebrates 20 years since its first release in June 1990, and its appearance in recent news is perhaps unfair to its legacy and importance in the world of photography and digital design. It's among the few hallowed pieces of technology to have its own verb, and it has democratized professional photo-editing on the Internet (bloggers spotted BP's Photoshop faux pas, not image analysis experts). Its ubiquity, however, has led us to an interesting question: Where does one draw the line between digital "improvement" and "manipulation"? "When I look at a picture I like to ask myself the question, is that real? If I can't tell, then the person either took a phenomenal photo or did a fantastic job in Photoshop," says Terry White, worldwide evangelist for Photoshop developers Adobe.

Telescope

China Leads in Outer Space Pollution

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© NASA PL-CaltechChina leads in outer space pollution
China has topped the list of the world's major polluters of the near-Earth space environment, followed by the United States and Russia, the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos said on Friday.

All together, the three main space powers produce 93% of space debris, according to a statement published on the agency's website.

"According to estimates, 40% of space debris is produced by China. The U.S.'s share accounts for 27.5%, and Russia's [share] for 25.5%, with 7% falling on other countries involved in space exploration," the statement said.

The NASA Orbital Debris Program Office has named Russia and CIS countries as the main polluters of outer space. According to the organization, Russia and its former Soviet allies disposed of a total of 5,833 spacecraft or their parts, including 1,402 satellites and 4,431 parts of carrier rockets, by ejecting them into near-Earth space.