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Backward star ain't from around here

Ken Croswell
New Scientist
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:03 UTC
Image
© ESO Online Digitized Sky Survey
Kapteyn's Star is part of a 'Moving group' in the constellation of Pictor
Here's an apple that landed far from the tree. A dim star just 13 light years from Earth was born in a cluster 17,000 light years away.

Discovered in 1897, Kapteyn's Star is the 25th nearest star system to our sun, but it is no local, says Elizabeth Wylie-de Boer of Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra.

The cool star's composition is tricky to study, but astronomers can look at 16 other stars in the same "moving group", all of which orbit the galaxy backwards and are very old. The odd motion marks them as members of the Milky Way's ancient population of halo stars.

Of the stars, 14 had the same abundance of elements - such as sodium, magnesium, zirconium, barium - as Omega Centauri, the galaxy's most luminous globular cluster. The cluster emits a million times more light than the sun.

"It's long been thought that Omega Centauri is the left-over nucleus of a dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way," says Wylie-de Boer, whose paper will appear in the Astronomical Journal. "During the merger, the outer regions of this dwarf galaxy were stripped."
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Blackbox

In SUSY we trust: What the Large Hadron Collider is really looking for

Anil Ananthaswamy
New Scientist
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:49 UTC
Image
© CMS
This simulation depicts the decay of a Higgs particle following a collision of two protons in the CMS experiment
As damp squibs go, it was quite a spectacular one. Amid great pomp and ceremony - not to mention dark offstage rumblings that the end of the world was nigh - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's mightiest particle smasher, fired up in September last year. Nine days later a short circuit and a catastrophic leak of liquid helium ignominiously shut the machine down.

Now for take two. Any day now, if all goes to plan, proton beams will start racing all the way round the ring deep beneath CERN, the LHC's home on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg is worried. It's not that he thinks the LHC will create a black hole that will engulf the planet, or even that the restart will end in a technical debacle like last year's. No: he's actually worried that the LHC will find what some call the "God particle", the popular and embarrassingly grandiose moniker for the hitherto undetected Higgs boson.

"I'm terrified," he says. "Discovering just the Higgs would really be a crisis."

Why so? Evidence for the Higgs would be the capstone of an edifice that particle physicists have been building for half a century - the phenomenally successful theory known simply as the standard model. It describes all known particles, as well as three of the four forces that act on them: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces.

It is also manifestly incomplete. We know from what the theory doesn't explain that it must be just part of something much bigger. So if the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing but the Higgs, the standard model will be sewn up. But then particle physics will be at a dead end, with no clues where to turn next.
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Brick Wall

Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Collider?

Eben Harrell
Time
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:51 UTC
Image
© Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty
Large Hadron Collider in 2007

Sometime on Nov. 3, the supercooled magnets in sector 81 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, began to dangerously overheat. Scientists rushed to diagnose the problem, since the particle accelerator has to maintain a temperature colder than deep space in order to work.

The culprit? "A bit of baguette," says Mike Lamont of the control center of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built and maintains the LHC. Apparently, a passing bird may have dropped the chunk of bread on an electrical substation above the accelerator, causing a power cut. The baguette was removed, power to the cryogenic system was restored and within a few days the magnets returned to their supercool temperatures.

While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment.
Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future.
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Info

Solar Chariot 3600 Years Old Unearthed in Saratov Region


Russia-InfoCentre
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:00 UTC
Image
The ancient find is a psalium, an element of harness. Experts state that it is just 200 years younger than the first chariot, invented in that very part of the continent, according to research.

The psalium is made of a bull's hipbone. Amazing is the craftsmanship of the master who made this artifact, as well as the ideal state in which it has come down to us.

The swastika was once a symbol of the solar chariot. It is corroborated by archeological finds unearthed not far from the Nizhnyaya Krasavka Settlement of the Saratov Region. The site of the ancient settlement of the Arians has been examined by students and professors for three years already. Within this period the expedition acquired around 20,000 artifacts of various value.
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Magnify

Spaniards discover forgotten Euphrates city

Paola Del Vecchio
ANSAmed
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:17 UTC
Madrid - They have renamed it the city recovered from the Euphrates and it is found in the Syrian enclave of Tall Qabr on the banks of the river that, with the Tigris, was the centre of the birth of civilisation in Mesopotamia. It is a circularly planned city, dating back to 2,600 years before Christ.

Galician archaeologists from an expedition from the University of Coruna made the discovery, led by Jean Luis Montero, who identified two layers dating back to from the IV to first millennium before Christ. Since 2008 the multidisciplinary expedition, made up of 20 people, has been working in the area known as the Hill of the Tomb in the Euphrates Valley on an excavation campaign in collaboration with the Syrian government in which various universities are participating with Spain's Superior Centre for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the Syrian Ministry of Culture.
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Info

Underground lines that bypass monuments


Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:12 UTC
Image
© Ortega et al. /UV
This is an image of underground lines that bypass monuments.
A team of mathematicians from the Engineering and Architecture Schools of the University of Seville has created a method to design underground lines whereby a city's historical buildings are unaffected. The results of the study, which has just been published in the Journal of the Operational Research Society, offer possible solutions for the future underground line 2 in Seville.

"The methodology applied seeks to minimise the length of underground lines -with the subsequent economic saving- and to maximise their distance from historic buildings to avoid their being damaged", Francisco A. Ortega, co-author of the study and professor at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of the University of Seville, explains to SINC.
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Health

Ireland: Donegal brain surgeon at work in AD 800, burial site reveals

Marese McDonach
Irish Times
Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:58 UTC
Brain surgery was being carried out in Ireland more than 1,000 years ago - and patients survived.

People with disabilities were treated with compassion and respect within their communities in medieval Ireland but TB and other diseases, possibly including cancer, claimed many lives while others died by the sword.

A multitude of insights about life and death in Gaelic Ireland were gleaned following the discovery of an unknown medieval church and the graves of about 1,300 men, women and children who lived along the banks of the river Erne at Ballyhanna, Co Donegal, several hundred years ago.

The burial ground, which spanned several centuries, was found during the construction of the Ballyshannon/ Bundoran bypass in 2003.
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Sherlock

Scientists Unveil Plant DNA Barcode

Rachel Cooper
The Telegraph
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:33 UTC
Image
© Photo: Getty
A section of DNA is to be used as a kind of barcode that will allow it to be easily identified
A new way of classifying DNA looks likely to create shortcuts in many processes that are currently rather tricky.

Scientists meeting at the third International Barcode of Life conference in Mexico City this week have agreed on a region of DNA that will be used to identify plants by genus in a new system of codification.

Although genetic "barcoding" of animals, which allows scientists to identify animals from a small section of their DNA, is already well-established, the system has until now not worked for plant species.

Data about different plant species will then be made available to scientists around the world on a global database and the technology could be used in a number of ways, including tackling the illegal trade in endangered species and identifying new pathways of food webs.
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Magnify

Exploration by Explosion: Studying the Inner Realm of Living Cells


ScienceDaily
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:00 UTC
Image
© American Chemical Society
A tiny glass fiber is used to vaporize contents of cells to study the cell contents.
Scientists in Washington, DC, are reporting development and successful tests of a new way for exploring the insides of living cells, the microscopic building blocks of all known plants and animals. They explode the cell while it is still living inside a plant or animal, vaporize its contents, and sniff. The study appears in online in ACS' journal Analytical Chemistry.

Akos Vertes and Bindesh Shrestha note that knowing the contents of cells is the key to understanding how healthy cells differ from those in disease. Until now, however, the only way to "look" inside an individual cell was to remove it from its natural environment in an animal or plant, or change its environment. But doing so changed the cell. Scientists never knew whether one cell differed from another because of the disease, or because they had removed it to a new environment.

The new report describes development of a new technique that uses laser pulses focused through a tiny glass fiber to explode a cell and turn its contents into vapor. Scientists then use a laboratory instrument to analyze the vapor and get a profile of the chemicals inside. It can reveal differences between diseased and healthy cells, even between adjacent cells in the same tissue. The scientists used this new technique to analyze the contents of living plant and animal cells and show that it quickly and accurately identified important chemical details that would have been overlooked using conventional techniques.
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Sherlock

New Dinosaur Species Found in South Africa

Celean Jacobson
The Associated Press
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:30 UTC
Image
© AP Photo/Denis Farrell
Paleontologist Adam Yates , second left, displays fossilized bones of a new dinosaur species, Aardonyx Celestae, from the early Jurassic period (about 200 million years old) during an announcement of the discovery at the University of the Witwatersrand
A newly discovered dinosaur species that roamed the Earth about 200 million years ago may help explain how the creatures evolved into the largest animals on land, scientists in South Africa said Wednesday.

The Aardonyx celestae was a 23-foot- (7-meter-) long small-headed herbivore with a huge barrel of a chest, and the scientists told reporters it could prove to be a missing evolutionary link.

This is a species "that no one has seen before and one that has a very significant position in the family tree of dinosaurs," said Australian paleontologist Adam Yates.

Yates, who is based at the University of the Witwatersrand's Bernard Price Institute for Paleontological Research, led the research with a number of other local and international scientists.

Their findings were published Wednesday in the Proceedings of The Royal Society B, a London-based peer-reviewed journal.
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