Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Huge stellar nursery found in dusty corner of our galaxy


New Scientist
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:40 UTC
A vast stellar nursery 14,000 light years away has been hiding behind a thick cloud of dust. It is one of the biggest in our galaxy, and may offer insight into how these objects can grow so big.

The stellar nursery, called CTB 102, is home to perhaps thousands of newborn stars. Measuring 380 light years across, the nursery is a so-called H II region, where the hottest and most massive stars have stripped hydrogen gas of its electrons. The most famous of these regions is the Orion nebula, but CTB 102 is over 10 times its size.

CTB 102 has eluded recognition because it is in the Perseus arm, the spiral arm of the Milky Way next out from ours, where dust blocks visible light. Its size and distance from Earth were unveiled by mapping radio waves emitted from hydrogen gas.
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Calculator

Animals that count - How numeracy evolved

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:32 UTC
Clever Hans's gift was just too good to be true. The Arabian stallion wowed the crowds in early 20th-century Europe with his apparent ability to stomp out the answers to simple mathematical problems, such as 12 - 3 = 9. He could even add fractions and factorise small numbers. Then in 1907, a German psychologist, Oskar Pfungst, proved that Hans was no animal savant.

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Satellite

Russian Zenit Rocket Puts Malaysian Satellite Into Orbit


Space Daily
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:47 UTC
Image
© UnknownMeasat-3a carries 12 Ku-band and 12 C-band active transponders
A Russian Zenit-3SLB carrier rocket launched from the Baikonur space center put Malaysia's Measat-3a communications satellite into orbit on Monday, a Federal Space Agency Roscosmos official said.

"The Russian carrier successfully put the foreign satellite into transfer orbit. Control over the satellite has been transferred to the client, who is responsible for putting the apparatus into geostationary orbit," the official said.

Measat-3a carries 12 Ku-band and 12 C-band active transponders along with three antennas, and has a service life of 15 years.
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Satellite

New NASA Missions To Reach Moon Tuesday


Moon Daily
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:40 UTC
Image
© UnknownThe LCROSS swingby starts near the lunar south pole and continues north along the far side of the moon. The maneuver will put the LCROSS spacecraft and its spent second stage Centaur rocket in the correct flight path for the October impact near the lunar south pole.
Two NASA spacecraft will reach major mission milestones early Tuesday morning as they approach the moon - one will send back live streaming imagery via the Internet as it swings by the moon, the other will insert itself into lunar orbit to begin mapping the moon's surface.

After a four and a half day journey to the moon, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, will be captured by the moon's gravity and prepare for the commissioning phase of its mission on June 23. NASA TV live coverage of LRO's orbit insertion begins at 5:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday, with the actual engine burn to begin orbit insertion starting at 5:47 a.m.

In addition to animation and footage of LRO, live interviews will be broadcast from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., with Cathy Peddie, LRO deputy project manager at Goddard; Jim Garvin, Goddard chief scientist; Laurie Leshin, Goddard deputy director for Science and Technology; Mike Wargo, NASA's chief lunar scientist in the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington; Rich Vondrak, LRO project scientist at Goddard; and Craig Tooley, LRO project manager at Goddard.
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Magnify

Carb synthesis sheds light on promising tuberculosis drug target

Laura Kiessling
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:53 UTC
Madison - A fundamental question about how sugar units are strung together into long carbohydrate chains has also pinpointed a promising way to target new medicines against tuberculosis.

Working with components of the tuberculosis bacterium, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison identified an unusual process by which the pathogen builds an important structural carbohydrate. In addition to its implications for human health, the mechanism offers insight into a widespread but poorly understood basic biological function - controlling the length of carbohydrate polymers.
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Info

Obsidian 'trail' provides clues to how humans settled, interacted in Kuril Islands

Joel Schwarz
University of Washington
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:50 UTC
Archaeologists have used stone tools to answer many questions about human ancestors in both the distant and near past and now they are analyzing the origin of obsidian flakes to better understand how people settled and interacted in the inhospitable Kuril Islands.

Using X-ray fluorescence spectrometers, archaeologists from the University of Washington and the Smithsonian Institution have found the origin of 131 flakes of obsidian, a volcanic glass. These small flakes were discarded after stone tools were made from obsidian and were found at 18 sites on eight islands in the Kurils. The flakes were found with other artifacts that were dated over a time period spanning about 1,750 years, from 2500 to 750 years before the present.
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Info

Citizens in 34 countries show implicit bias linking males more than females with science

Brian Nosek
University of Virginia
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:44 UTC
Implicit stereotypes - thoughts that people may be unwilling to express or may not even know that they have - may have a powerful effect on gender equity in science and mathematics engagement and performance, according to a new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The international study involving more than half a million participants in 34 countries revealed that 70 percent harbor implicit stereotypes associating science with males more than with females. Moreover, in countries whose citizens stereotyped most strongly, boys achieved at a higher level in eighth-grade science and math.

Implicit stereotypes may contribute to continuing underachievement and under-participation among girls and women in science compared to their male peers.
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Saturn

ASU instrument takes better look at Mars minerals

Robert Burnham
Arizona State University
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:33 UTC
Image
© Arizona State UniversityPastel colors swirl across Mars, revealing differences in the composition and nature of the surface in this recently taken false-color infrared THEMIS image. Showing an area 31.9 kilometers (19.8 miles) by 88.3 kilometers (54.9 miles) in the southern highlands of Mars, the image is a result of the earlier orbit time for Mars Odyssey and THEMIS. In the image, dark areas mark exposures of relatively cold ground with abundant bare rock, while warmer basaltic sand covers the light blue-green regions. Reddish areas likely have a higher silica content, due either to a different volcanic composition or to weathering.
A slow drift in the orbit of NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft that mission controllers started nine months ago is now giving an ASU instrument on the spacecraft a better and more sensitive view of minerals on the surface of Mars. The instrument is the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS), an infrared and visual camera operated by ASU's Mars Space Flight Facility.

The maneuver to change Odyssey's orbit began Sept. 30, 2008, and ended June 9, 2009, with a five-and-a-half-minute thruster firing. The rocket burn fixed the spacecraft's track so that THEMIS looks down on the planet at an earlier time of day, 3:45 in the afternoon instead of 5 p.m.
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Info

Dino-not-so-soaring

Victoria Picknell
Wiley-Blackwell
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:28 UTC
The largest animals ever to have walked the face of the earth may not have been as big as previously thought, reveals a paper published today in the Zoological Society of London's Journal of Zoology.

Scientists have discovered that the original statistical model used to calculate dinosaur mass is flawed, suggesting dinosaurs have been oversized.

Widely cited estimates for the mass of Apatosaurus louisae, one of the largest of the dinosaurs, may be double that of its actual mass (38 tonnes vs. 18 tonnes).
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Chalkboard

Here's how to solve Oak Island mystery

Beverley Ware
Chronicle Herald
Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:24 UTC
Just hand over $15m - first payment, $500,000.

Western Shore - For only $15 million, you could uncover the mystery of Oak Island.
The good news is you'd only have to spend about half a million to begin with because that's about what it would cost to find out if the project's worth pursuing.

Three civil engineering students from McGill University in Montreal were given the assignment to find a way to safely recover any treasure that could be buried at the bottom of the money pit on Oak Island.

Their project received honourable mention from the dean of civil engineering.

The students' professor is Les MacPhie, senior geotechnical engineer at SNC-Lavalin.

Comment: Laura Knight-Jadczyk, in her must-read and well-researched book Through a Glass Darkly: Hidden Masters, Secret Agendas and a Tradition Unveiled sheds some light on Oak Island's mysteries, in a long journey through the continents and the centuries, in search for Truth.

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