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Study Of Satellite Imagery Casts Doubt On Surge's Success In Baghdad


Science Daily
Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:41 UTC
By tracking the amount of light emitted by Baghdad neighborhoods at night, a team of UCLA geographers has uncovered fresh evidence that last year's U.S. troop surge in Iraq may not have been as effective at improving security as some U.S. officials have maintained.

Image
©University of California - Los Angeles
Satellite image of night lights in Baghdad. By tracking the amount of light emitted by Baghdad neighborhoods at night, a team of UCLA geographers has uncovered fresh evidence that last year's U.S. troop surge in Iraq may not have been as effective at improving security as some U.S. officials have maintained.

Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery.
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Telescope

Oldest-ever Gamma-ray Burst Detected


Science Daily
Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:26 UTC
NASA's Swift satellite has found the most distant gamma-ray burst ever detected. The blast, designated GRB 080913, arose from an exploding star 12.8 billion light-years away.

Image
©NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler
This image merges the view through Swift's UltraViolet and Optical Telescope, which shows bright stars, and its X-ray Telescope, which

"This is the most amazing burst Swift has seen," said the mission's lead scientist Neil Gehrels at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It's coming to us from near the edge of the visible universe."

Because light moves at finite speed, looking farther into the universe means looking back in time. GRB 080913's "lookback time" reveals that the burst occurred less than 825 million years after the universe began.

The star that caused this "shot seen across the cosmos" died when the universe was less than one-seventh its present age. "This burst accompanies the death of a star from one of the universe's early generations," says Patricia Schady of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London, who is organizing Swift observations of the event.
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Star

New Sunspot!


SpaceWeather.com
Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:24 UTC


New sunspot
©Pete Lawrence

A new sunspot is emerging in the sun's northern hemisphere. After several months of almost-relentlessly blank suns, "this is like a breath of fresh plasma," says photographer Pete Lawrence who sends this picture from Selsey, UK. The magnetic polarity of the emerging spot identifies it as a member of new Sunspot Cycle 24.
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Evil Rays

Mosquito causes buzz across the Pond

Gavin O'Connor
South Wales Echo
Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:44 UTC
A device created by a South Wales inventor to disperse unruly youngsters is making a big buzz in the Big Apple.

The Mosquito, which targets gangs of loitering youths, projects a shrill noise audible only to teens and young adults.

It was created by Merthyr Tydfil inventor Howard Stapleton and has already hit the headlines in the UK for both upsetting civil liberties groups and pleasing shop owners.

Comment: Interesting how the police forces in the U.S. love to see citizens "fleeing" from them or their "toys."

Quite telling, actually.

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Telescope

Pulsating Stars Enable New Precise Determination Of Rotation Of The Milky Way


Science Daily
Sun, 21 Sep 2008 14:25 UTC
New, very precise measurements have shown that the rotation of the Milky Way is simpler than previously thought. A remarkable result from the most successful ESO instrument HARPS, shows that a much debated, apparent 'fall' of neighbourhood Cepheid stars towards our Sun stems from an intrinsic property of the Cepheids themselves.

Image
©ESO
Artist's impression of the local neighbourhood of the Sun and its setting within our galaxy, the Milky Way (see insert above). The figure shows the positions of some bright stars (in white) in the sky as well as the eight Cepheids used in the investigation (in blue). After the rotation of the Milky Way had been accounted for (red arrow), it seemed that the Cepheids were all 'falling' towards the Sun (blue arrows; these are not to scale: in reality the blue velocities are typically a factor one hundred smaller than the velocity around the Milky Way). New, very precise measurements with the HARPS instrument have shown that this apparent 'fall' is due to effects within the Cepheids themselves and is not related to the way the Milky Way rotates. The motion indicated by the blue arrows is thus an illusion. The scale of the image is given in light-years (ly).
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Star

Astrophysicists 'Weigh' Galaxy's Most Massive Star


Science Daily
Sun, 21 Sep 2008 14:21 UTC
Theoretical models of stellar formation propose the existence of very massive stars that can attain up to 150 times the mass of our Sun.

Image
©CRAQ
Astrophysicists successfully "weighed" a star of a binary system with a mass 116 times greater than that of the Sun. Located in the massive star cluster NGC 3603, the supermassive star system, known under the name of A1, has a rotation period of 3.77 days.

Until very recently, however, no scientist had discovered a star of more than 83 solar masses. Now an international team of astrophysicists, led by Université de Montréal researchers from the Centre de recherche en astrophysique du Québec (CRAQ), has found and "weighed" the most massive star to date.

Olivier Schnurr, Jules Casoli and André-Nicolas Chené, all graduates of the Université de Montréal, and professors Anthony F. J. Moffat and Nicole St-Louis, successfully "weighed" a star of a binary system with a mass 116 times greater than that of the Sun, waltzing with a companion of 89 solar masses, doubly beating the previous record and breaking the symbolic barrier of 100 solar masses for the first time.
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Robot

MIT adds robotics, voice control to wheelchair


The New England Journal of Technology
Sun, 21 Sep 2008 02:09 UTC
MIT reports its researchers are developing a robotic, voice-driven wheelchair, which would allow a user to be able to tell the wheelchair to go to a specific location, rather than control every twist and turn.
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Monkey Wrench

What happened to the Big Bang machine?

Paul Rincon
BBS News
Sun, 21 Sep 2008 01:56 UTC
The fault that has shut down the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be hugely disappointing for scientists and engineers following the successful "start-up" of the experiment.
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Arrow Down

Spacecraft on collision course with Earth

Mark Furman
KVAL
Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:55 UTC


jules verne spacecruft
©ESA

Better to burn out than fade away? For a celestial chunk of important space junk, the next few weeks will offer several faint glimpses of what will soon be a fireball.

An unmanned spacecraft that ferried cargo to the International Space Station will make a few more visible passes overhead before crash landing into the Earth's atmosphere on or around Sept. 29.

The Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle launched March 9, 2008, and arrived at the International Space Station on April 3, where it remained docked while tons of cargo were off-loaded -- and tons of waste materials from the space station were loaded back onto the ATV.
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Snowman

Permafrost that lives up to its name: Ancient Canadian ice survived previous warm periods

Hannah Hoag
Nature
Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:08 UTC


Image
©Duane Froese, University of Alberta
Undergound ice can last a long time

A 740,000-year-old wedge of ice discovered in central Yukon Territory, Canada, is the oldest known ice in North America. It suggests that permafrost has survived climates warmer than today's, according to a new study.

"Previously, it was thought that the permafrost had completely disappeared from the interior about 120,000 years ago," says Duane Froese, an earth scientist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who is the author of the study published today in Science. "This deep permafrost appears to have been stable for more than 700,000 years, including several periods that were warmer and wetter."
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