Science & TechnologyS


Meteor

Clues To Planets' Birth Discovered In Meteorites


Science Daily
Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:54 UTC
Meteorites that are among the oldest rocks ever found have provided new clues about the conditions that existed at the beginning of the solar system, solving a longstanding mystery and overturning some accepted ideas about the way planets form.

The ancient meteorites, like disk drives salvaged from an ancient computer, still contain magnetic records about the very early history of planets, according to research by MIT planetary scientist Benjamin P. Weiss.
meteorite
© Maria Zucolotto (Museu Nacional; Brasil)A picture of the first discovered (and therefore eponymous) angrite "Angra dos Reis"; which was observed to fall from the sky in 1869 near the town of Angra dos Reis in Brazil. The black; shiny face was produced from melting of the meteorite's surface during passage through Earth's atmosphere. Scale bar is in centimeters.

Weiss, the Victor P. Starr Career Development Assistant Professor of Planetary Sciences in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and his five co-authors examined pieces of three meteorites called angrites, which are among the most ancient rocks known. The results of their study are being published in Science on Oct. 31.
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Hourglass

Phoenicians Left Deep Genetic Mark, Study Shows

John Noble Wilford
The New York Times
Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:38 UTC
The Phoenicians, enigmatic people from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, stamped their mark on maritime history, and now research has revealed that they also left a lasting genetic imprint.

Scientists reported Thursday that as many as 1 in 17 men living today on the coasts of North Africa and southern Europe may have a Phoenician direct male-line ancestor.

These men were found to retain identifiable genetic signatures from the nearly 1,000 years the Phoenicians were a dominant seafaring commercial power in the Mediterranean basin, until their conquest by Rome in the 2nd century B.C.
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Display

Catching Earthquake Details With Ordinary Laptop Computers


Science Daily
Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:22 UTC
Inside your laptop is a small accelerometer chip, there to protect the delicate moving parts of your hard disk from sudden jolts.

It turns out that the same chip is a pretty good earthquake sensor, too - especially if the signals from lots of them are compared, in order to filter out more mundane sources of laptop vibrations, such as typing.

It's an approach that is starting to gain acceptance. The project Quake Catcher Network (QCN), already has about 1500 laptops connected in a network that has detected several tremors, including a magnitude 5.4 quake in Los Angeles in July. Led by Elizabeth Cochran at the University of California, Riverside, and Jesse Lawrence at Stanford University, QCN uses the same BOINC platform for volunteer computing that projects like SETI@home rely on.
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Igloo

Mysterious genetic past for the Iceman

Bruce Bower
Science News
Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:45 UTC
A 5,000-year-old mummy displays a genetic signature no longer found in Europe, according to its complete mitochondrial DNA sequence.
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Telescope

Searching For Primordial Antimatter


Science Daily
Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:34 UTC
Scientists are on the hunt for evidence of antimatter - matter's arch nemesis - left over from the very early Universe. New results using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Compton Gamma Ray Observatory suggest the search may have just become even more difficult.

Antimatter is made up of elementary particles, each of which has the same mass as their corresponding matter counterparts --protons, neutrons and electrons -- but the opposite charges and magnetic properties. When matter and antimatter particles collide, they annihilate each other and produce energy according to Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2.
Bullet Cluster
© X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/M.Markevitch et al. Optical: NASA/STScI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.This view of the Bullet Cluster is a combination of X-rays from Chandra (red) and optical data from the Hubble and Magellan telescopes (yellow). Scientists have examined this system with Chandra and Compton to look for evidence of antimatter that may be found in X-ray and gamma ray emission. The results did not reveal the signature for antimatter, meaning that if it is there, antimatter is less than 3 parts per million in this system.
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Cow Skull

Significant Fossil Discovery In Utah Shows Land Plants Of 200 Million Years Ago


Science Daily
Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:20 UTC
The importance of a new archeological site in St George, Utah, U.S. was recently highlighted by Andrew Milner, Paleontologist, City of St. George, Jim Kirkland, State Paleontologist and Sidney Ash, Paleo-botanists. The site is significant because it is the only early Jurassic land flora known in the western United States. It provides evidence that a variety of land plants were present in the area about 200 million years ago.
archeological site in Utah
© St. George Dinosaur Discovery SiteA significant archeological site in Utah provides evidence that a variety of land plants were present at this location about 200 million years ago.

The site was originally studied and written about in 2006, after a developer found the plant fossils while excavating the land for an industrial park. Now, developers along with scientists are working together to preserve the fossils. "This plant site is extremely important to help us examine further the vegetation recovery of plant life during the mass extinction at the end of the Triassic epoch," states Jim Kirkland, Utah State Paleontologist.
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Telescope

Hubble Scores A Perfect 10: Arp 147 Galaxy in Full View


Science Daily
Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:14 UTC
The Hubble Space Telescope is back in business with a snapshot of the fascinating galaxy pair Arp 147.

Just a couple of days after the orbiting observatory was brought back online, Hubble aimed its prime working camera, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), at a particularly intriguing target, a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147.

The image demonstrated that the camera is working exactly as it was before going offline, thereby scoring a "perfect 10" both for performance and beauty.
Galazy Arp 147
© NASA, ESA, and M. Livio (STScI)Perfect "10" due to the chance alignment of two galaxies. The left-most galaxy, or the "one" in this image, is relatively undisturbed, apart from a smooth ring of starlight. It appears nearly edge-on to our line of sight. The right-most galaxy, the "zero" of the pair, exhibits a clumpy, blue ring of intense star formation.

And literally "10" for appearance too, due to the chance alignment of the two galaxies. The left-most galaxy, or the "one" in this image, is relatively undisturbed, apart from a smooth ring of starlight. It appears nearly edge-on to our line of sight. The right-most galaxy, the "zero" of the pair, exhibits a clumpy, blue ring of intense star formation.
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Info

Real Robinson Crusoe: Evidence Of Alexander Selkirk's Desert Island Campsite


Science Daily
Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:07 UTC
Cast away on a desert island, surviving on what nature alone can provide, praying for rescue but fearing the sight of a boat on the horizon. These are the imaginative creations of Daniel Defoe in his famous novel Robinson Crusoe. Yet the story is believed to be based on the real-life experience of sailor Alexander Selkirk, marooned in 1704 on a small tropical island in the Pacific for more than four years, and now archaeological evidence has been found to support contemporary records of his existence on the island.
Robinson Crusoe, showing Crusoe and Friday
© iStockphoto/Duncan WalkerA scene from Robinson Crusoe, showing Crusoe and Friday.

An article in the journal Post-Medieval Archaeology presents evidence from an archaeological dig on the island of Aguas Buenas, since renamed Robinson Crusoe Island, which reveals evidence of the campsite of an early European occupant. The most compelling evidence is the discovery of a pair of navigational dividers which could only have belonged to a ship's master or navigator, as evidence suggests Selkirk must have been. Indeed Selkirk's rescuer, Captain Woodes Rogers' account of what he saw on arrival at Aguas Buenas in 1709 lists 'some practical pieces' and mathematical instruments amongst the few possessions that Selkirk had taken with him from the ship.
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Info

Programmable Genetic Clock Made Of Blinking Florescent Proteins Inside Bacteria Cells


Science Daily
Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:03 UTC
UC San Diego bioengineers have created the first stable, fast and programmable genetic clock that reliably keeps time by the blinking of fluorescent proteins inside E. coli cells. The clock's blink rate changes when the temperature, energy source or other environmental conditions change, a fact that could lead to new kinds of sensors that convey information about the environment through the blinking rate.
programmable genetic clock
© UC San Diego Jacobs School of EngineeringUC San Diego bioengineers have created the first stable, fast and programmable genetic clock that reliably keeps time by the blinking of fluorescent proteins inside E. coli cells. The clock's blink rate changes when the temperature, energy source or other environmental conditions change, a fact that could lead to new kinds of sensors that convey information about the environment through the blinking rate. One of the keys to this advance are the sophisticated microfluidic systems capable of controlling environmental conditions of their E. coli cells with great precision that have been developed in Jeff Hasty's bioengineering lab at UC San Diego.
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Satellite

Mercury was once alive with volcanoes

Will Dunham
Reuters
Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:03 UTC
WASHINGTON - While it seems like a geologically dead planet today, early in its history tiny Mercury may have been a caldron of volcanic activity, NASA scientists said on Wednesday.
Mercury
© NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of WashingtonImage of Mercury captured by MESSENGER on the probe's second approach.

Data from the U.S. space agency's car-sized MESSENGER probe's latest close encounter with the planet nearest the sun on October 6 is helping to settle a debate dating back to the 1970s over the role volcanoes played in Mercury's history.

MESSENGER sent back images showing extensive and deep lava flows on the surface, including hardened lava more than a mile deep filling a crater 60 miles in diameter.

The unmanned spacecraft also detected a so-called "wrinkle ridge," a long geological feature on Mercury's surface about 2,000 feet high apparently caused by long-ago contraction of the planet as it cooled, the scientists said.
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