Science & TechnologyS


Laptop

Interplanetary internet gets permanent home in space

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:20 UTC
Image
© STS-119 Shuttle Crew/NASAThe International Space Station is now testing a new communications protocol that could form the backbone of a future interplanetary internet
The interplanetary internet now has its first permanent node in space, aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The new software will make sending data from space less like using the telephone, and more like using the web. In the modern era of the web and information on demand, teams still have to schedule times to send and receive data from space missions.

But the newly installed system aboard the ISS could one day allow data to flow between Earth, spacecraft, and astronauts automatically, creating what is being dubbed the "interplanetary internet".
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Info

Eavesdropping on the music of the brain

Nora Schultz
New Scientist
Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:16 UTC
What does the human brain sound like? Now you can find out thanks to a technique for turning its flickering activity into music. Listening to scans may also give new insights into the differences and similarities between normal and dysfunctional brains.

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Info

First direct evidence of substantial fish consumption by early modern humans in China

Erik Trinkaus
Washington University in St. Louis
Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:13 UTC
Freshwater fish are an important part of the diet of many peoples around the world, but it has been unclear when fish became an important part of the year-round diet for early humans.

A new study by an international team of researchers, including Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, shows it may have happened in China as far back as 40,000 years ago.

The study will be published online the week of July 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Laptop

Computer reveals stone tablet 'handwriting' in a flash

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:20 UTC
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© Michail Panagopolous, et alArchaeologists have discovered more than 50,000 stone inscriptions from ancient Athens and Attica so far. However, attributing the pieces to particular cutters so they can be dated has proven tricky
You might call it "CSI Ancient Greece". A computer technique can tell the difference between ancient inscriptions created by different artisans, a feat that ordinarily consumes years of human scholarship.

"This is the first time anything like this had been done on a computer," says Stephen Tracy, a Greek scholar and epigrapher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who challenged a team of computer scientists to attribute 24 ancient Greek inscriptions to their rightful maker. "They knew nothing about inscriptions," he says.

Tracy has spent his career making such attributions, which help scholars attach firmer dates to the tens of thousands of ancient Athenian and Attican stone inscriptions that have been found.

"Most inscriptions we find are very fragmentary," Tracy says. "They are very difficult to date and, as is true of all archaeological artefacts, the better the date you can give to an artefact, the more it can tell you."
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Powertool

Flashback Why Vulcan, Google, and ATV Are Backing AltaRock Energy, Betting on Next-Gen Geothermal

Gregory T. Huang
xconomy.com
Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:28 UTC
Geothermal is one of those energy sources that you know is there, but you don't hear about much. Until it comes rushing to the surface, as it did with this week's announcement that AltaRock Energy has closed a second round of financing worth $26.25 million, bringing the geothermal firm's total venture funding to about $30 million. The new investors are Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital, Google.org, and Massachusetts-based Advanced Technology Ventures, which joined existing heavy hitters Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

I caught up with AltaRock CEO Don O'Shei yesterday to get his take on the deal. (Vulcan declined to comment for this story.) AltaRock "could not be more excited about what this financing, being made by such a knowledgeable group of investors, means for us and for the future of renewable energy," said O'Shei. As he explains, "It's about the transformative nature of engineered geothermal systems. Google, ATV, and Vulcan are very savvy investors, pretty good at sorting out what are smart bets and what are unattractive bets. It confirms what we think about the market...and it shows a general acceptance of the need for renewables by the broader financial markets."

Comment: There is no mention here of the possible triggering of earthquakes by this technology.

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Syringe

Virologist to make his case for lab origin of swine flu

Peter Duveen
Peter's New York
Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:04 UTC
The scientist who made headlines in May by positing a laboratory origin for the swine flu that has swept the world will defend his theory in the scientific literature, Peter's New York has learned.

Dr. Adrian Gibbs, a Canberra, Australia-based virologist with more than 200 scientific publications to his credit, said that over the weekend he submitted his latest work on the swine flu to a prominent scientific journal, and is awaiting a response.

Gibbs, 75, was part of a team that developed the antiviral drug Tamiflu.
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Eye 1

Sociopath captain let Titanic's passengers die without a qualm

Marc Horne
Scotland On Sunday
Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:12 UTC
For nearly a century debate has raged over whether he was the man who ignored the plight of hundreds who died in the sinking of the Titanic.

A series of inquiries spanning several decades have failed to condemn or clear Captain Stanley Lord over allegations he turned a blind eye to the "unsinkable" ship's frantic attempts to summon help.

Now a controversial new book has posthumously pointed the finger directly at the mariner - claiming he was a "sociopath" whose callous indifference condemned 1,517 to a watery grave.
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Satellite

Coolest Spacecraft Ever In Orbit Around L2 (-273 Degrees Celsius)


ScienceDaily
Sat, 04 Jul 2009 07:06 UTC
On July 2 the detectors of Planck's High Frequency Instrument reached their amazingly low operational temperature of -273°C, making them the coldest known objects in space. The spacecraft has also just entered its final orbit around the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, L2. Planck is equipped with a passive cooling system that brings its temperature down to about -230°C by radiating heat into space. Three active coolers take over from there, and bring the temperature down further to an amazing low of -273.05°C, only 0.1°C above absolute zero - the coldest temperature theoretically possible in our Universe.
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Meteor

Clues to origin of life revealed in Tagish Lake meteorite


CBC News
Sun, 05 Jul 2009 06:45 UTC
tagish lake meteorite
© Photo by P.A. Hunt, Geological Survey of Canada, Natural Resources Canada.Photo 2:Photomicrograph in crossed polars of a portion of a polished thin section of the Tagish Lake Meteorite. The bright areas A-E are preserved high temperature silicate (olivine, pyroxene) 'chondrules' in a dark matrix of clay, serpentine, magnetite, sulphide, carbonate and phosphate etc. Object 'D' is approximately 0.3mm across.
New research into a meteorite that crashed into northern British Columbia nine years ago is revealing startling clues that could help unravel the origins of life on Earth.

Parts of the Tagish Lake meteorite were found on a frozen lake near the Yukon border in January, 2000, after it fell to Earth in a spectacular blue-green fireball that was seen for hundreds of kilometres.

Researchers recovered parts of the still-frozen meteorite after an extensive search. Since then, scientists have repeatedly tried to unlock the clues that the rare 4.5 billion-year-old carbon and water rich meteorite has long been suspected to contain.
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Pistol

Fellow students smell your exam fear


New Scientist
Sat, 04 Jul 2009 06:21 UTC
Students facing exams this month, take heart: your companions can smell your fear, and they empathise.

That's the implication of a study by Bettina Pause at the University of Dusseldorf, Germany, and colleagues. They put absorbent pads under the armpits of 49 university students an hour before they took their final oral exam and again as the same students exercised. Another set of students then sniffed the sweat samples while having their brains scanned.

None perceived a difference between the two types of sweat, but the pre-exam sweat had a different effect on brain activity, lighting up areas that process social and emotional signals, as well as several areas thought to be involved in empathy (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005987).
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