Science & TechnologyS

Ladybug

Nature: A Perfect Prototype

Sanjida O'Connell and Nick Evershed
The Sydney Morning Herald
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:49 UTC
Forget human ingenuity - the best source of ideas for cutting-edge technology might be in the natural world.

Humans like to think we're pretty good at design and technology - but we often forget that Mother Nature had a head start of 3.6 billion years. Now the burgeoning science of biomimicry, which reverse-engineers clever ideas from the natural world, is exploiting the way geckoes climb walls or hummingbirds hover.
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Hourglass

Prehistoric flute in Germany is oldest known

Patrick McGroarty
Associated Press
Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:19 UTC
flute
© AP Photo/Daniel MaurerProfessor Nicholas Conard of the University in Tuebingen shows a flute during a press conference in Tuebingen, southern Germany, on Wednesday, June 24, 2009
A bird-bone flute unearthed in a German cave was carved some 35,000 years ago and is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archaeologists say, offering the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture.

A team led by University of Tuebingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard assembled the flute from 12 pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in a small plot of the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany.

Together, the pieces comprise a 8.6-inch (22-centimeter) instrument with five holes and a notched end. Conard said the flute was 35,000 years old.
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Telescope

Meteor shower, comet highlights in July

Bernie Reim
Morning Sentinel
Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:32 UTC
Summer is now upon us and this will be a good month to enjoy the sky in spite of the short nights. The bright planets are evenly split this month, with the gas giants Saturn and Jupiter visible in the evening sky and our neighboring terrestrial planets, Venus and Mars, visible in the morning sky.

There will be two more very exciting celestial events taking place this month, but only one of them will be visible for us in New England. The annual Delta Aquarid Meteor Shower will peak during the morning hours of July 28. This shower actually begins around the middle of July and blends right into the famous Perseid Meteor Shower, which starts at the end of July and peaks on August 12.

Caused by Comet Machholz, you can expect around 15 to 20 Delta Aquarids per hour that morning. The moon will be first quarter and will set around midnight. Meteor showers are usually better after midnight, anyway, since that is when the earth is spinning directly into the meteors, like snowflakes on the front windshield of your car during a snowstorm. The whole earth can be seen as a little spaceship continually orbiting the sun at 18.6 miles per second, or 67,000 miles per hour.
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Meteor

Comets Seeded Earth's Early Atmosphere


Technology Review
Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:21 UTC
The ratio of nitrogen isotopes in several comets almost exactly matches the ratio on Earth, implying that our early atmosphere probably came from a cometary bombardment.

Astrobiologists have long puzzled over the origin of Earth's oceans. But they've dwelt a little less long over a related question: where does the nitrogen in our atmosphere come from? Now a new analysis by Damien Hutsemekers and pals at the Universite de Liege, in Belgium, suggests an answer to both questions.

One of the most attractive theories of the origin of our water is that Earth was once bombarded by icy comets that left a watery residue. The trouble is that the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in water on Earth is much lower than it is in the few comets we've been able to measure it in (i.e., Halley, Hyakutake, Hale-Bopp, and C/2002 T7 LINEAR). So if these types of comets, which we know came from the Oort Cloud, did supply Earth's water, it must have mixed with water already on Earth that had a very low deuterium content.
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Telescope

New focus on the moon

Nicole Staab
Arizona State University
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:32 UTC
Tempe, Ariz. - NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) has taken and received its first images of the Moon, kicking off the year-long mapping mission of Earth's nearest celestial neighbor. The LROC imaging system, under the watchful eyes of Arizona State University professor Mark Robison, the principal investigator, consists of two Narrow Angle Cameras (NACs) to provide high-resolution black-and-white images, a Wide Angle Camera (WAC) to provide images in seven color bands over a 60-kilometer (37.28-mile) swath, and a Sequence and Compressor System (SCS) supporting data acquisition for both cameras.
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Telescope

New Class of Black Holes Discovered

Hadley Leggett
Wired
Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:38 UTC
Image
Only two sizes of black holes have ever been spotted: small and super-massive. Scientists have long speculated that an intermediate version must exist, but they've never been able to find one until now.

Astrophysicists identified what appears to be the first-ever medium-sized black hole, pictured in an artist's rendition above, with a mass at least 500 times that of our Sun. Researchers from the Centre d'Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements in France detected the middling hole in a galaxy about 290 million light-years from Earth.
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Star

University of Hawaii at Manoa astronomers discover pair of solar systems in the making

Dr. Jonathan Williams
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:36 UTC
Image
© University of Hawaii and Nathan Smith, University of California at BerkeleyLeft: This is a Submillimeter Array image of 253-1536 taken at a wavelength of 880 microns. The mass of the disk on the left is 70 times the mass of Jupiter, while the one on the right is 20 Jupiter masses. Right: The optical image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the shadow of the large disk, but the smaller disk is obscured in the glare of the brighter star.
Two University of Hawaii at Mฤnoa astronomers have found a binary star-disk system in which each star is surrounded by the kind of dust disk that is frequently the precursor of a planetary system. Doctoral student Rita Mann and Dr. Jonathan Williams used the Submillimeter Array on Mauna Kea, Hawaii to make the observations.

A binary star system consists of two stars bound together by gravity that orbit a common center of gravity. Most stars form as binaries, and if both stars are hospitable to planet formation, it increases the likelihood that scientists will discover Earth-like planets.
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Info

Unexpectedly long-range effects in advanced magnetic devices

Michael Baum
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:25 UTC
Image
© Shapiro, NISTNIST MOIF (Magneto-optic imaging film) technique is unique in being able to image magnetic domains in real time while they are forming, growing and disappearing. Bright and dark regions represent stray magnetic fields as domains change. Here a series of MOIF images shows reversal of domains in a ferromagnetic film having a grid of antiferromagnetic strips on top as the external field increases to the right.
A tiny grid pattern has led materials scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Institute of Solid State Physics in Russia to an unexpected finding - the surprisingly strong and long-range effects of certain electromagnetic nanostructures used in data storage. Their recently reported findings* may add new scientific challenges to the design and manufacture of future ultra-high density data storage devices.
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R2-D2

Toyota Research Achieves Brain Control of Wheelchair

Martyn Williams
PCWorld
Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:32 UTC
Image
Researchers in Japan have developed a brain-machine interface (BMI) system that allows for control of a wheelchair using thought.

The system processes brain thought patterns and can turn them into left, right and forward movements of the wheelchair with a delay as short as one-thousandth of a second. That's a vast improvement over other systems that can take as long as several seconds to analyze and react to the user's thoughts.

It was developed by scientists at the BSI-Toyota Collaboration Center, a research and development center established in 2007 by Japanese government-related research unit RIKEN, Toyota Motor, Toyota Central R&D Labs and Genesis Research Institute.
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Saturn

Uranium Found on the Moon

Clara Moskowitz
Space.com
Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:58 UTC
Uranium exists on the moon, according to new data from a Japanese spacecraft.

The findings are the first conclusive evidence for the presence of the radioactive element in lunar dirt, the researchers said. They announced the discovery recently at the 40th Lunar and Planetary Conference and at the Proceedings of the International Workshop Advances in Cosmic Ray Science.

The revelation suggests that nuclear power plants could be built on the moon, or even that Earth's satellite could serve as a mining source for uranium needed back home.
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