Science & TechnologyS


Ambulance

When plants cry for help...

A University of British Columbia researcher has discovered a new way to fight pests in vegetable crops: By listening for the plants' own distress call.

Info

Asteroid explorer's kitlist includes a ribbon

Some have proposed blasting them with a nuclear warhead. Others have drawn up plans for robotic tugs to alter their course.

Of all the plans to save mankind from the threat of extinction caused by a collision with an asteroid, tying a yellow ribbon around one must be the least violent and complex of all.

Bulb

Russian Satellites: Smaller, Lighter, Cheaper

Mini-satellites are all the rage these days. None of the Russian space firms attending the MAKS-2007 air show failed to exhibit one. Modern technologies enable spacecraft weighing a few hundred kilograms to perform tasks once the preserve of satellites of several tons. Satellites are getting ever lighter and smaller: there are already micro-satellites with a weight of between 10 and 100 kg, and nano-satellites, between 1 and 10 kg. Designers have even conceived of pico-satellites, weighing less than one kilogram, but they are still a long way off.

Telescope

Cosmic Cockroaches



©Achim Tappe and colleagues.
Supernova remnant N132D. Contours trace hot gas observed by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Colors denote IR radiation mapped by the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Starved. Stomped. Radiated. Poisoned. It's all in a day's work for the common household cockroach. The abuse these creatures can withstand is amazing. But astronomers have found something even tougher-"polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons," says Achim Tappe of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics. "They can survive a supernova."

Telescope

Thermometer Camera Reveals New Frontiers



©Space Daily
Large Bolometer Camera (LABOCA) array wiring side.

Space is a vast expanse which hides deep within its depths the secrets behind how the first galaxies emerged from the Big Bang. Now thanks to the world's largest bolometer camera constructed and operated by a collaborative European consortium, these secrets will slowly begin revealing themselves to scientists worldwide.

Video

Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes find 'Lego-block' galaxies in early universe

The conventional model for galaxy evolution predicts that small galaxies in the early Universe evolved into the massive galaxies of today by coalescing. Nine Lego-like "building block" galaxies initially detected by Hubble likely contributed to the construction of the Universe as we know it. "These are among the lowest mass galaxies ever directly observed in the early Universe" says Nor Pirzkal of the European Space Agency/STScI.

Pirzkal was surprised to find that the galaxies' estimated masses were so small. Hubble's cousin observatory, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope was called upon to make precise determinations of their masses. The Spitzer observations confirmed that these galaxies are some of the smallest building blocks of the Universe.

Bulb

Race for 'next big thing' in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley's annual coming-out season for tech start-ups is about to turn into a stampede.

In the next few weeks, the wraps will be removed from some 150 new companies and products at a handful of events in California competing to identify the tech industry's Next Big Thing.

Telescope

UK plan to track asteroid threat

UK space scientists and engineers have designed a mission to investigate a potentially hazardous asteroid.

The 300m-wide (980ft) rock, known as Apophis, will fly past Earth in April 2029 at a distance that is closer than many communications satellites.

Astrium, based in Stevenage, Herts, wants a probe to track the asteroid so its orbit can be better understood.

©Astrium
Under the proposal Apex would rendezvous with Apophis in January 2014 and spend three years sending data back to scientists and engineers on Earth. From the data, orbit modelling would enable an accurate prediction of the risk of collision with our planet.

Telescope

Russia Space Agency plans protecting Earth from asteroids

The Russian Federal Space Agency plans creating a system of anti-asteroid protection after 2026, the agency's director Anatoly Perminov told a news conference on Friday.

Telescope

Traced: The asteroid breakup that wiped out the dinosaurs

The extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago can be traced to a collision between two monster rocks in the asteroid belt nearly 100 million years earlier, scientists report on Wednesday.

©Southwest Research Institute
Computer modeling shows that the parent object of asteroid (298) Baptistina, which was approximately 170-kilometres in diameter with characteristics similar to carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, was disrupted 160 million years ago when it was hit by another asteroid estimated to be 60-kilometres in diameter (L) .The extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago can be traced to a collision between two monster rocks in the asteroid belt nearly 100 million years earlier, scientists report. The two pictures on the right show remnants of the collision impacting the Earth and Moon. Image obtained from Southwest Research Institute.