Science & TechnologyS


Magic Wand

Star Trek warp drive is a possibility, say scientists

Roger Highfield
Telegraph
Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:49 UTC
Two physicists have boldly gone where no reputable scientists should go and devised a new scheme to travel faster than the speed of light.

# Star Trek technology: The reality
# A brief history of warp drives
# Warp Drive - A New Approach [the paper]

The advance could mean that Star Trek fantasies of interstellar civilisations and voyages powered by warp drive are now no longer the exclusive domain of science fiction writers.
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Display

Google: Virus Attacks Skyrocketed In July

Eric Zeman
Information Week
Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:51 UTC
Google's Postini operation keeps a watchful eye on all the malevolent code and viruses that transit the Internet. Last month, it saw e-mail virus attacks surge, with 10 million nasty e-mails sent on July 24th alone.

I am not surprised to see these statistics from Google. I noticed a dramatic increase in the number of spam messages in my in-box beginning last month. According to Google, July and August typically see a boost in the amount of virus attacks. It said the most common attack last month was a "spoofed UPS package-tracking link". In the e-mail, users are tempted to download some sort of malware.
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Meteor

Australia: Clyde primary school finds ancient meteorite

Dimity Barber
Herald Sun
Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:25 UTC
Clyde Primary School has been rocked by news it is the custodian of a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite.

Principal Maurie Richardson said the school had received word from Museum Victoria that an 85kg rock on display at the school is a fragment of Cranbourne's world-famous meteorite shower, the Cranbourne Leader reports.

Mr Richardson said when he announced the news over the PA system a huge cheer rang out across the school.
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Meteor

MIT solves puzzle of meteorite-asteroid link

David Chandler
MIT
Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:53 UTC
For the last few years, astronomers have faced a puzzle: The vast majority of asteroids that come near the Earth are of a type that matches only a tiny fraction of the meteorites that most frequently hit our planet.

Since meteorites are mostly pieces of asteroids, this discrepancy was hard to explain, but a team from MIT and other institutions has now found what it believes is the answer to the puzzle. The smaller rocks that most often fall to Earth, it seems, come straight in from the main asteroid belt out between Mars and Jupiter, rather than from the near-Earth asteroid (NEA) population.
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Magnify

Cataloguing invisible life: Microbe genome emerges from lake sediment


Physorg.com
Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:19 UTC


methylotenera
©Photo: Dennis Kunkel - Color: Ekaterina Latypova
hi-res image
Microorganisms from a mud sample collected in Lake Washington. The purple and orange organisms are relatives of Methylotenera mobilis, whose complete DNA sequence is now published.

When entrepreneurial geneticist Craig Venter sailed around the world on his yacht sequencing samples of seawater, it was an ambitious project to use genetics to understand invisible ecological communities. But his scientific legacy was disappointing - a jumble of mystery DNA fragments belonging to thousands of unknown organisms.
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Hourglass

Colossal Head of Roman Empress Unearthed

Marc Waelkens
Archaeology
Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:37 UTC
Sagalassos, Turkey - Tuesday morning, archaeologists of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven team (Belgium) directed by Marc Waelkens uncovered the colossal portrait head of the Roman empress Faustina, wife of the emperor Antoninus Pius, who ruled from A.D. 138 to 161. According to Waelkens, the excavation team was ecstatic at the discovery.

faustina
©Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project
Excavators prop up the newly found head of the empress Faustina the Elder
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Robot

Rat-brain robot aids memory study


BBC News
Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:17 UTC
A robot controlled by a blob of rat brain cells could provide insights into diseases such as Alzheimer's, University of Reading scientists say.

rat brain robot
©BBC
The robot and rat brain cells work together


Comment: Enter link to view video

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Bulb

Leg bone yields DNA secrets of man's Neanderthal 'Eve'


Guardian
Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:50 UTC


Neanderthal
©Unknown

Some confusion has arisen over our account of Neanderthals, which said at one point that they are thought to have died out 30,000 years ago, but at another that this happened 40,000 years ago. Our correspondent's best judgment now is that they disappeared somewhere between these two dates. As to their height, which has also been disputed, that seems usually to have been between 5ft 4in and 5ft 7in.

Strands of DNA recovered from the fossilized leg bone of a Neanderthal have shed light on the fragility of the ancient population and pinpointed when they first split from what were to become modern humans.
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Cloud Lightning

Researchers track aerosol's effects on cloud control

Todd Morton
Ars Technica
Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:17 UTC
The global climate is a complex system - something that isn't simply controlled by the concentration of a single greenhouse gas or one type of cloud in the sky. Researchers have completed a study on the effects of aerosol layers and their influence on cloud formation, a key parameter in understanding and controlling local climate. If you're a mad scientist bent on global weather domination, start taking notes now.
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Bulb

Big-brained animals evolve faster


University of Chicago Press Journals
Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:22 UTC


Image
©Daniel Sol
Parrots have a big brain and are also one of the most evolutionarily diversified bird clades.

Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have wondered why some lineages have diversified more than others. A classical explanation is that a higher rate of diversification reflects increased ecological opportunities that led to a rapid adaptive radiation of a clade. A textbook example is Darwin finches from Galapagos, whose ancestor colonized a competitors-free archipelago and rapidly radiated in 13 species, each one adapted to use the food resources in a different way.

This and other examples have led some to think that the progenitors of the major evolutionary radiations are those that happened to be in the right place and at the right time to take advantage of ecological opportunities. However, is it possible that biological diversification not only depends on the properties of the environment an ancestral species finds itself in, but also on the features of the species itself? Now a study supports this possibility, suggesting that possessing a large brain might have facilitated the evolutionary diversification of some avian lineages.
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