Red planet gigapixel HD probesat cam imagery distilled

NASA and Microsoft have teamed up to present huge amounts of 3-D Mars mapping data, gleaned by space probes in orbit about the red planet, in a form usable by anyone with a net connection.

"These incredibly detailed maps will enable the public to better experience and explore Mars," says NASA's Michael Broxton, a boffin in the Intelligent Robotics Group at the space agency's Ames centre in Silicon Valley.

"The collaborative relationship between NASA and Microsoft Research was instrumental for creating the software that brings these new Mars images into people's hands, classrooms and living rooms."

Why have so few heard of one of the great heroes of modern physics?

In 1935, Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen outlined an extraordinary paradox associated with the then emerging science of quantum mechanics.

They pointed out that quantum mechanics allows two objects to be described by the same single wave function. In effect, these separate objects somehow share the same existence so that a measurement on one immediately influences the other, regardless of the distance between them.

To Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen this clearly violated special relativity which prevents the transmission of signals at superluminal speed. Something had to give.

Despite the seriousness of this situation, the EPR paradox, as it became known, was more or less ignored by physicists until relatively recently.

Today, we call the relationship between objects that share the same existence entanglement. And it is the focus of intense interest from physicists studying everything from computing and lithography to black holes and photography.

It's fair to say that while the nature of entanglement still eludes us, few physicists doubt that a better understanding will lead to hugely important insights into the nature of reality.

Bozeman -- Research by a Montana State University doctoral student and one of the nation's top paleontologists is upending more than 100 years of thought regarding the dinosaurs known as Triceratops and Torosaurus.

Since the late 1800s, scientists have believed that Triceratops and Torosaurus were two different types of dinosaurs. Triceratops had a three-horned skull with a rather short frill, whereas Torosaurus had a much bigger frill with two large holes through it.

MSU paleontologists John Scannella and Jack Horner said in the July 14 issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, however, that Triceratops and Torosaurus are actually the same dinosaur at different stages of growth. They added that the discovery contributes to an unfolding theory that dinosaur diversity was extremely depleted at the end of the dinosaur age.

The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology is the official journal of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Scannella is a doctoral student in earth sciences, and Horner is Regents Professor of Paleontology at MSU's Museum of the Rockies.

The confusion over Triceratops and Torosaurus was easy to understand, Scannella said, because juvenile dinosaurs weren't just miniature versions of adults. They looked very different, and their skulls changed radically as they matured. Recent studies have revealed extreme changes in the skulls of pachycephalosaurs, tyrannosaurs and other dinosaurs that died out about 65 million years ago in North America.

"Paleontologists are at a disadvantage because we can't go out into the field and observe a living Triceratops grow up from a baby to an adult," Scannella said. "We have to put together the story based on fossils. In order to get the complete story, you need to have a large sample of fossils from many individuals representing different growth stages."

The Triceratops study suggests that it is critical that paleontologists consider ontogeny (growth from a juvenile to an adult) as a source of major morphological variations before naming new species of dinosaurs to account for variation between specimens, Scannella added.

Imagine an exceedingly complex circuit board. Wires often split -- seemingly at random -- and connect in strange and unexpected ways.

This is how Princeton University researchers developing a new method for studying brain connectivity see the brain.

Because of its intricate organization, figuring out the wiring diagram that explains how the billions of neurons in the brain are connected, and determining how they work together, remains a formidable task. But success in this endeavor could transform the field of neuroscience, offering a map toward increased knowledge of how the brain works, with implications for learning more about conditions ranging from depression and schizophrenia to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

Funded by a $993,000 National Institutes of Health Challenge Grant through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Lynn Enquist, a professor in Princeton's Department of Molecular Biology and in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, is leading an effort to use genetically engineered viruses as explorers that travel throughout the nervous system, tracing the connections between neurons and reporting on their activity along the way.

Much of life on Earth gets regularly wiped out every 27 million years, according to boffins. It had been thought that this was caused by a dark star named "Nemesis", but apparently that was wrong. The next globo-extinction event is due in about 16 million years' time.

The revelations are made in a new paper from paleontologist Richard K Bambach of the Smithsonian Institution and astronomer Adrian Melott, flagged up by the Physics arXiv blog and viewable online.

According to Bambach, there's no doubt at all that every 27 million years-odd, huge numbers of species suddenly become extinct. He says this is confirmed by "two modern, greatly improved paleontological datasets of fossil biodiversity" and that "an excess of extinction events are associated with this periodicity at 99% confidence". This regular mass slaughter has apparently taken place around 18 times, back into the remote past of half a billion years ago.

This had previously been noted by other scientists - though not confirmed so far back into the past - which had led to theorising on what could have caused such long-separated, regular disasters.

A tiny clay fragment dating from the 14th century BC, which was discovered outside Jerusalem's Old City walls, contains the oldest written document found in the city, researchers say.

The 3,350-year-old clay fragment was uncovered during sifting of fill excavated from beneath a 10th century BC tower, dating from the period of King Solomon in an area near the southern wall of the Old City, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem said today in an emailed statement. Details of the find appear in the current Israel Exploration Journal.

The find, believed to be part of a tablet from a royal archive, further testifies to the importance of Jerusalem as a major city in the Late Bronze Age, long before its conquest by King David, the statement said.

The fragment, which is two centimetres (less than one inch) by 2.8 centimetres in size and one centimetre thick, contains cuneiform, or wedge-shaped, symbols in ancient Akkadian. The fragment was likely part of a royal missive, according to Wayne Horowitz, a scholar of Assyriology at the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology.

A solar wind stream flowing from the indicated coronal hole should hit Earth's magnetic field on July 13th or 14th.

During the time it takes you to read this article, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn't believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page.

"It's called a flux transfer event or 'FTE,'" says space physicist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn't exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible."

Indeed, today Sibeck is telling an international assembly of space physicists at the 2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Alabama, that FTEs are not just common, but possibly twice as common as anyone had ever imagined.

Sunspot 1087 is developing into a behemoth many times wider than Earth. It now has dozens of dark cores with a long magnetic filament snaking among them:

"What amazing active region!" says Britta Suhre, who took the picture from her backyard observatory in Rosenheim, Germany: "It is real fun to photograph."

The filament is crackling with B- and C-class solar flares, as shown in these movies from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The biggest and most spectacular eruption so far was a C3-flare on July 9th (movie).

Vlad the Impaler, the medieval Romanian prince who inspired the character of Count Dracula, was not a blood-thirsty tyrant, he was simply a misunderstood victim of bad Western European propaganda, a new exhibition has claimed.

The show, which has just opened in Bucharest, attempts to rehabilitate Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad Dracula or Vlad the Impaler, who ruled Wallachia in the 15th century.

"Vlad Dracula was doubtlessly cruel, but not more so than other princes of his time," said Margot Rauch, the Austrian curator of the exhibition, entitled "Dracula - Voivode and Vampire".

Vlad was born in the town of Sighisoara, in Transylvania, in 1431. He ruled over Wallachia, now a region of Romania, between 1456 and 1462 and was reputed to have killed thousands of political opponents, common criminals and captured Turkish soldiers by having them impaled on sharp wooden stakes. It is estimated he had 50,000 people put to death.