Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

World's Largest Solar Telescope Open For Business

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© UnknownThe new instrument has three times the aperture of the old telescope. It represents a significant advance in high-resolution observations of the Sun, since it has the largest aperture of any solar telescope in existence, said Goode. Since it is an off-axis telescope, there is no part of the sunlight blocked by the telescope.
NJIT's new 1.6-meter clear aperture solar telescope - the largest of its kind in the world - is now operational. The unveiling of this remarkable instrument - said to be the pathfinder for all future, large ground-based telescopes - could not have come at a more auspicious moment for science.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescope
that he used to demonstrate that sunspots are indeed on the Sun.

"With our new big, beautiful white machine, Galileo's work can leap ahead with a capability never before available," said NJIT Distinguished Professor of Physics Philip R. Goode.

Better Earth

Evidence For Liquid Water On Early Frozen Mars

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© NASAEvidence suggests flowing water formed the rivers and gullies on the Mars surface, even though surface temperatures were below freezing. Dissolved minerals in liquid water may be the reason.
NASA scientists modeled freezing conditions on Mars to test whether liquid water could have been present to form the surface features of the Martian landscape.

Researchers report that fluids loaded with dissolved minerals containing elements such as silicon, iron, magnesium, potassium
and aluminum, can remain in a liquid state at temperatures well below freezing. The results of this research appear in the May 21 issue of Nature magazine entitled "Stability Against Freezing of Aqueous Solutions on Early Mars."

"We found that the salts in water solutions can reduce the melting point of water, which may help explain how liquid water existed in a frozen Martian environment," said Alberto Fairen, a space scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. and the lead author of the study.

Light Saber

US lab debuts super laser

super lasar
© AFPA US weapons lab pulled back the curtain on a super laser with the power to burn as hot as a star.
A US weapons lab on Friday pulled back the curtain on a super laser with the power to burn as hot as a star.

The National Ignition Facility's main purpose is to serve as a tool for gauging the reliability and safety of the US nuclear weapons arsenal but scientists say it could deliver breakthroughs in safe fusion power.

"We have invented the world's largest laser system," actor-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said during a dedication ceremony attended by thousands including state and national officials.

Better Earth

The First Noctilucent Clouds of 2009

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© Martin McKenna
New data from NASA's AIM spacecraft show that noctilucent clouds (NLCs) are like a great "geophysical light bulb." They turn on every year in late spring, reaching almost full intensity over a period of no more than 5 to 10 days.

News flash: The bulb is beginning to glow. The first NLCs of 2009 were sighted over Russia on May 27th, and an even brighter display appeared last night, May 29th, over Denmark and the British Isles. Martin Mc Kenna sends these snapshots from Maghera, Northern Ireland.


Telescope

Jupiter's Moon Show

Every six years, Earth spends a number of months passing through the orbital plane of Jupiter's moons. During the passage, amateur astronomers get to see a rare display of "mutual occultations." Jupiter's moons eclipse one another in plain view of backyard telescopes.

On May 25th, Mike Salway of Central Coast, Australia, watched Ganymede eclipse Io. Click to watch.

Images like these are unprecedented. Although Jupiter's moons put on the same kind of show in 2002-2003, no one recorded such clear pictures. "Imaging techniques and equipment have improved immensely over the past 6 years," notes Salway. "So this is the first year where amateurs are recording these events and producing detailed, high-resolution images of the phenomena."

Monkey Wrench

Sweet tooth drives tool use in chimpanzees

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© clix, stock.xchngSome chimps use multi-purpose tools to forage honey from hives
If you're impressed that chimps can use tools to hunt or crack nuts, wait till you hear what they do when foraging for honey. Not only do they construct several different tools for the purpose, but they use them sequentially - an achievement approaching the abilities of early Stone Age humans.

A team led by Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, studied chimps living in Loango National Park in Gabon. They found that the chimps built and used five different types of tools to help them find beehives and extract honey: thin, straight sticks to probe the ground for buried nests; thick, blunt-ended pounders to break open beehive entrances; thinner lever-like enlargers to break down walls within the hive; collectors with frayed ends to dip honey from the opened hive and bark spoons to scoop it out. Various tools were often found near the same hive, suggesting that the chimps employ them in sequence (Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: link).

Question

Earth's protective shield is stealing our air

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© NASA / Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFCArtist's impression of the Earth's magnetosphere, buffeted by the solar wind
As well as safeguarding our atmosphere, the Earth's protective shield may be stealing some of it on the sly.

The region in space that contains the Earth's magnetic field, known as the magnetosphere, protects us from the charged particles that come streaming from the sun. By acting as a barrier to this solar wind, it is also thought to prevent these particles transferring enough of their energy to gas molecules in the atmosphere for these molecules to escape the Earth's gravitational pull.

This may be only half the story, though. At the poles, the magnetosphere might be aiding loss of the atmosphere, according to Stas Barabash of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna, who is principal investigator for the European Space Agency's Venus Express mission. Barabash bases his suggestion on measurements of the flow of ions escaping from Venus, Mars and Earth. It is thought that Venus has never had a magnetosphere, whereas Mars did until its magnetic dynamo wound down 3.5 billion years ago.

Blackbox

Theorists Reveal Path to True Muonium

muonium
© Graphic: Terry Anderson/SLACIn this artist's depiction of how experimentalists could create true muonium, an electron (blue) and a positron (red) collide, producing a virtual photon (green) and then a muonium atom, made of a muon (small yellow) and an anti-muon (small purple). The muonium atom then decays back into a virtual photon and then a positron and an electron. Overlaying this process is a figure indicating the structure of the muonium atom: one muon (large yellow) and one anti-muon (large purple).
True muonium, a long-theorized but never-seen atom, might be observed in future experiments, thanks to recent theoretical work by researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Arizona State University. True muonium was first theorized more than 50 years ago, but until now no one had uncovered an unambiguous method by which it could be created and observed.

"We don't usually work in this area, but one day we were idly talking about how experimentalists could create exotic states of matter," said SLAC theorist Stanley Brodsky, who worked with Arizona State's Richard Lebed on the result. "As our conversation progressed, we realized 'Gee...we just figured out how to make true muonium.'"

Saturn

Freeze-thaw cycle may explain Saturn moon's odd activity

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© Cassini Imaging Team/SSI/JPL/ESA/NASASaturn's moon Enceladus spews out watery geysers today, but it can't have done so continuously throughout its lifetime, as there is no heat source to power the activity for so long. A new mechanism has been proposed to explain how the moon may freeze and thaw repeatedly.
If there is life on Saturn's bizarre, water-spewing moon Enceladus, it's about to spend a lot of time in the freezer.

So concludes Norman Sleep of Stanford University, who says a perpetual cycle of melting and refreezing may offer the best explanation for why Enceladus seems so active today. In Sleep's scenario, Enceladus is now heading back into a long cold phase after a comparatively brief warm spell.

For any potential life on Enceladus, "it's boom and bust", says Sleep. Sleep raised the idea at this week's American Geophysical Union meeting in Toronto, Canada, after researchers learned that Enceladus is pouring out 15 gigawatts of heat - more than double earlier estimates. The new number makes matters worse for scientists trying to explain where all the heat comes from. It far exceeds what can be accounted for by the decay of radioactive elements and tidal stress - strains induced by Saturn's pull on the moon.

Info

Giant dinosaurs kept heads held high

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© Axel MauruszatDinosaur icons such as Diplodocus held their long necks high in the air not horizontally as previously thought
Did giant plant-eating dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus hold their long necks vertically or horizontally? In the long-running debate, the old-fashioned view that they held their heads up high is edging ahead.

Sauropods - stars of countless exhibitions, documentaries and books - have been depicted since the early 20th century with an upright posture. But doubt was cast on this when it was realised how hard their hearts would have to work to pump blood to their brains. Computer models of the vertebrae also suggested that the animals held their necks low. This led museums and film-makers to start showing sauropods grazing with necks stretched horizontally.