Science & TechnologyS


Palette

Revealed: The cave paintings which could show how humans survived dramatic climate change during the Ice Age

prehistoric art
Prehistoric find: The caves in northern Spain contain more than 300 images of animals - the largest ever found on the Iberian peninsula
British scientists are set to unlock the secrets of hidden cave paintings which could reveal how humans survived during the changing climate of the Ice Age more than 15,000 years ago.

The paintings, concealed in the caves of northern Spain, will be dated accurately for the first time by experts from the University of Bristol using a new technique based on the radioactive decay of uranium.

A team from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology has just returned from an expedition to the Cantabria and Asturias regions of Spain, where they removed samples from more than 20 prehistoric painted caves.

Frog

Mysterious Snippets of DNA Withstand Eons of Evolution

Stanford, California - Small stretches of seemingly useless DNA harbor a big secret, say researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. There's one problem: We don't know what it is. Although individual laboratory animals appear to live happily when these genetic ciphers are deleted, these snippets have been highly conserved throughout evolution.

"The true function of these regions remains a mystery, but it's clear that the genome really does need and use them," said Gill Bejerano, PhD, assistant professor of developmental biology and of computer science. In fact, these so-called "ultraconserved" regions are about 300 times less likely than other regions of the genome to be lost during mammalian evolution, according to research from Bejerano and graduate student Cory McLean published in the Oct. 2 issue of Genome Research.

Telescope

Flashback Defenses Down, Galactic Dust Storm Hits Solar System

Our solar system's natural defenses are down and a vigorous cosmic dust storm is blowing through, according to a new study. The forecast calls for a prolonged and increasing blizzard of small interstellar bits.

Meteor

Asteroid Enters Atmosphere, Just As Predicted

Nasa scientists at Ames Research Center in Mountain View say scientists did something Monday night that they've never been able to do before. They were able to predict where and when an asteroid would enter the earth's atmosphere.

The asteroid was about the size of a car and entered the atmosphere over the African country of Sudan going about eight miles a second. So far there are no reports of damage. It is believed that the space rock burned up before reaching the ground, although small pieces could have made it to the ground.

Scientists said space rocks of that size usually enter the earth's atmosphere about once or twice a year.

Comment: A 12 hour warning is not exactly reassuring, is it? Research collected on this site has shown that the killer space debris, when they come, will likely be comet fragments rather than asteroids. Comet fragments have the bad habit of travelling in large clusters and have been shown to hit the Earth much more frequently than admitted by mainstream science.


Telescope

Is It A Planet? Exotic Object Orbiting Star Stirs Exoplanet Classification Rethink

The European spacecraft COROT has discovered a massive planet-sized object orbiting its parent star closely, unlike anything ever spotted before. It is so exotic, that scientists are unsure as to whether this oddity is actually a planet or a failed star.
the Sun, COROT-exo-3b and Jupiter
© OAMPRelative sizes of the Sun, COROT-exo-3b and Jupiter, an artist's impression.

The object, named COROT-exo-3b, is about the size of Jupiter, but packs more than 20 times the mass. It takes only 4 days and 6 hours to orbit its parent star, which is slightly larger than the Sun.

COROT-exo-3b was found as the satellite observed the drop in the brightness of the star each time the object (COROT-exo-3b) passed in front. "We were taken by surprise when we found this massive object orbiting so close to its parent star", said Dr Magali Deleuil from the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM), leader of the team that made the discovery. She added, "COROT-exo-3b is really unique - we're still debating its nature."

Powertool

Mysterious Neolithic people made optical art

An exhibition in the Vatican, which is displaying hundreds of artifacts, has suggested that the mysterious Neolithic people made optical art.

According to a report in Discovery News, the exhibition, which is being held at the Palazzo della Cancelleria in the Vatican, introduces a mysterious Neolithic people who are now believed to have forged Europe's first civilization.

Meteor

Space rock found on collision course with Earth

For the first time, astronomers have found an object on a certain collision course with Earth. Fortunately, it is so small it is not expected to cause any damage, burning up in the atmosphere somewhere above northern Sudan in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. It may, however, produce a brilliant 'shooting star'.

The space rock, dubbed 2008 TC3, was first spotted on Monday in a survey by the Mt Lemmon Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. Its brightness suggests it is no more than about 5 metres across - so small it will likely be destroyed in the atmosphere, says Andrea Milani Comparetti of the University of Pisa in Italy.

Rocks of such size are thought to hit the atmosphere every few months, says Steve Chesley, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Meteor

Best of the Web: Incoming Asteroid - Will Hit Earth October 7

A small, newly-discovered asteroid named 2008 TC3 is approaching Earth and chances are good that it will hit. Steve Chesley of JPL estimates that atmospheric entry will occur on Oct 7th at 0246 UTC over northern Sudan [ref]. Measuring only a few meters across, the space rock poses NO THREAT to people or structures on the ground, but it should create a spectacular fireball, releasing about a kiloton of TNT in energy as it disintegrates and explodes in the atmosphere. Odds are between 99.8 and 100 percent that the object will encounter Earth, according to calculations provided by Andrea Milani of the University of Pisa. [ephemeris] [3D orbit]

HAL9000

'Intelligent' computers put to the test

Hal9000
© RGAHal, the supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Can machines think? That was the question posed by the great mathematician Alan Turing. Half a century later six computers are about to converse with human interrogators in an experiment that will attempt to prove that the answer is yes.

In the Turing test a machine seeks to fool judges into believing that it could be human. The test is performed by conducting a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer's responses are indistinguishable from those of a human, it has passed the Turing test and can be said to be "thinking".

Info

Earliest Animal Footprints Ever Found Show Animals Walking 30 Million Years Earlier Than Previously Thought

The fossilized trail of an aquatic creature suggests that animals walked using legs at least 30 million years earlier than had been thought. The tracks -- two parallel rows of small dots, each about 2 millimeters in diameter -- date back some 570 million years, to the Ediacaran period.
Trackway of one of the earliest animals
© Kevin Fitzsimons, Ohio State UniversityTrackway of one of the earliest animals, a multi-legged creature that walked over the bed of an ancient sea once covering Nevada. The animal left behind a pair of parallel impressions - small, round dots in the silt that later became rock.

The Ediacaran preceded the Cambrian period, the time when most major groups of animals first evolved.

Scientists once thought that it was primarily microbes and simple multicellular animals that existed prior to the Cambrian, but that notion is changing, explained Loren Babcock, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University.

"We keep talking about the possibility of more complex animals in the Ediacaran -- soft corals, some arthropods, and flatworms -- but the evidence has not been totally convincing," he said. "But if you find evidence, like we did, of an animal with legs -- an animal walking around -- then that makes the possibility much more likely."