Science & TechnologyS


Info

Altar to Mysterious Deity Found at Roman Fort

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News
Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:15 UTC
Image
© Adam Sanford Aerial-Cam 2009Shrine to a Mysterious God
This 1.5-ton, four-foot high carved stone relic shows a god-like figure standing on the back of a bull, with a thunderbolt in one hand and a battle axe in the other. It is a representation of the Anatolian god Juppiter of Doliche, which was believed to be a favorite deity among Roman soldiers, although there is no literary reference of the god.
A massive altar dedicated to an eastern cult deity has emerged during excavations of a Roman fort in northern England.

Weighing 1.5 tons, the four-foot high ornately carved stone relic, was unearthed at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, which was built by order of the Emperor Hadrian between 122-30 A.D.

The Romans built the defensive wall across the north of Britain from Carlisle to Newcastle-on-Tyne, to keep out invading armies from what is now Scotland.
Read More...
Monkey Wrench

Large Hadron Collider delayed again by vacuum leaks

Tom Espiner
ZDNet News
Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:17 UTC
LHC
© UnknownAn engineer works on closing up LHC sectors
The restart of the Large Hadron Collider has been pushed back further, following the discovery of vacuum leaks in two sectors of the experiment.

The world's largest particle collider is now unlikely to restart before mid-November, according to a Cern press statement. The project had been expected to start again in October.

To repair the leaks, which are from the helium circuit into the insulating vacuum, sectors 8-1 and 2-3 will have to be warmed from 80K to room temperature. Adjacent sub-sectors will act as 'floats', while the remainder of the surrounding sectors will be kept at 80K, Cern said in the statement. The repair work will not have an impact on the vacuum in the beam pipe.
Read More...
Hourglass

Human Stabbed a Neanderthal, Evidence Suggests

Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience.com
Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:02 UTC
Newly analyzed remains suggest that a modern human killed a Neanderthal man in what is now Iraq between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago. The finding is scant but tantalizing evidence for a theory that modern humans helped to kill off the Neanderthals.

The probable weapon of choice: A thrown spear.

The evidence: A lethal wound on the remains of a Neanderthal skeleton.

The victim: A 40- to 50-year-old male, now called Shanidar 3, with signs of arthritis and a sharp, deep slice in his left ninth rib.
Read More...
Meteor

Smashing days! New bright spot observed on Venus

Dr Emily Baldwin
Astronomy Now
Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:05 UTC
Image
An intense bright spot has appeared in the clouds of Venus. Could it be associated with volcanic activity on the surface?

The Solar System is breaking out in spots. First Jupiter took a smack from a passing asteroid or comet, manifesting as a dark scar in the Jovian atmosphere, and now Venus is sporting a brilliant white spot in its southern polar region.

In an alert to fellow amateur astronomers, Venus observer Frank Melillo reports on his images captured on 19 July: "I have seen bright spots before but this one is an exceptional bright and quite intense area."

Comment: Volcanic eruptions? Somebody knows what's really going on . . .

Military Hush-Up: Incoming Space Rocks Now Classified

Nothing to see here folks, please move along . . .

Read More...
Magnify

Ancient Mammal Tracks Found at National Monument


PhysOrg
Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:15 UTC
Footprint
© AP Photo/ Dinosaur National MonumentShows a small fossil mammal footprint, no bigger than a dime, on the Utah-Colorado border. Hundreds of tiny footprints left by mammals some 190 million years ago have been found on a canyon wall in a remote part of Dinosaur National Monument
Hundreds of tiny footprints left by mammals some 190 million years ago have been found on a canyon wall in a remote part of Dinosaur National Monument, park officials said Thursday.

The tracks are a rare find, mostly because they were left at a time when the area was a hostile, vast Sahara-like desert where towering sand dunes seldom preserved signs of animal life.

"It's just astonishing," Dan Chure, a paleontologist at the monument, said Thursday. "We were giggling like kids."

He and paleontologist George Engelmann of the University of Nebraska at Omaha spotted the tracks July 8 while scouring the area for fossils and other evidence from the early Jurassic period. Dinosaur National Monument, founded because of its rich and plentiful supply of dinosaur bones, straddles the Utah-Colorado border.
Read More...
People

Study: Facebook use cuts productivity at work

Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld
Fri, 24 Jul 2009 02:53 UTC
Only a few months after one study found that Facebook users tend to get lower grades in college, another study has found that the social networking site might not be earning good grades in the workplace as well.

Companies that allow users to access Facebook in the workplace lose an average of 1.5% in total employee productivity, according to a new report from Nucleus Research, an IT research company. The survey of 237 employees also showed that 77% of workers who have a Facebook account use it during work hours.

And "some" employees use the social networking site as much as two hours a day at work, the study found. Nucleus Research did not say how many workers fit into that category, but did note that one in 33 workers surveyed only used Facebook at work.
Read More...
Meteor

Scientists Still At Odds On Tunguska After 100 Years

David Burghardt
RIA Novosti
Fri, 24 Jul 2009 02:45 UTC
Image
© UnknownFour professors from the University of Bologna, Carlo Stanghellini, Maurizio Serrazanetti, Romano Serra, and Marco Cocchi, believe Lake Cheko was created by a meteorite impact due to its shape and tree growth in the area. The lake is elliptical (approximately 100 meters by 300 meters) rather than round, which is consistent with other lakes and swamps in the area. However, no impact ring or rim residue has been discovered at the lake, which would be noticeable had a meteorite created the lake. The native Evenki say that the lake has always been there and the name comes from the Evenki language meaning "dark waters."
More than 100 years have passed since the Tunguska Meteorite Event and the mystery of its occurrence remains unsolved, but scientists have not given up on solving the riddle. This July, an international research group from Italy and the United States ventured into deepest Siberia to investigate the most likely explanations of the mysterious event, and RIA Novosti correspondent David Burghardt joined them.

On June 30, 1908, Eastern Siberia was hit by an explosion equal to 2,000 times the nuclear bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945, destroying 2,200 square kilometers of taiga and flattening tens of millions of trees. If this impact had occurred four hours later, the city of St. Petersburg and other nearby villages would have been wiped off the face of the earth.

Comment: For an in-depth review, read Tunguska, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction.

Read More...
Telescope

Spitzer Images Out-Of-This-World Galaxy


Space Daily
Fri, 24 Jul 2009 02:37 UTC
Image
In the Spitzer image, infrared light with shorter wavelengths is blue, while longer- wavelength light is red. The galaxy's red spiral arms and the swirling spokes seen between the arms show dust heated by newborn stars. Older populations of stars scattered through the galaxy are blue. The fuzzy blue dot to the left, which appears to fit snuggly between the arms, is a companion galaxy.
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has imaged a wild creature of the dark - a coiled galaxy with an eye-like object at its center. The galaxy, called NGC 1097, is located 50 million light-years away. It is spiral-shaped like our Milky Way, with long, spindly arms of stars.

The "eye" at the center of the galaxy is actually a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars. In this color-coded infrared view from Spitzer, the area around the invisible black hole is blue and the ring of stars, white.

The black hole is huge, about 100 million times the mass of our sun, and is feeding off gas and dust along with the occasional unlucky star. Our Milky Way's central black hole is tame by comparison, with a mass of a few million suns.

"The fate of this black hole and others like it is an active area of research," said George Helou, deputy director of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Some theories hold that the black hole might quiet down and eventually enter a more dormant state like our Milky Way black hole."
Read More...
Magnify

Finding King Herod's Tomb

Barbara Kreiger
Smithsonian.com
Fri, 24 Jul 2009 02:06 UTC
Image
© Duby Tal / Albatross / IsraelImages Herod built an elaborate palace fortress on the 300-foot mountain, Herodium, to commemorate his victory in a crucial battle.
Shielding my eyes from the glare of the morning sun, I look toward the horizon and the small mountain that is my destination: Herodium, site of the fortified palace of King Herod the Great. I'm about seven miles south of Jerusalem, not far from the birthplace of the biblical prophet Amos, who declared: "Let justice stream forth like water." Herod's reign over Judea from 37 to 4 B.C. is not remembered for justice but for its indiscriminate cruelty. His most notorious act was the murder of all male infants in Bethlehem to prevent the fulfillment of a prophecy heralding the birth of the Messiah. There is no record of the decree other than the Gospel of Matthew, and biblical scholars debate whether it actually took place, but the story is in keeping with a man who arranged the murders of, among others, three of his own sons and a beloved wife.
Read More...
Meteor

Best of the Web: Stephen Hawking: Space debris represents biggest natural threat to humanity

Casey Kazan & Rebecca Sato
dailygalaxy.com
Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:13 UTC
Image
© Space Telescope Science InstituteSomething wicked this way comes
Stephen Hawking believes that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets. "We have observed," Hawking points out in Life in the Universe, "the collision of a comet, Schumacher-Levi, with Jupiter (below), which produced a series of enormous fireballs, plumes many thousands of kilometers high, hot "bubbles" of gas in the atmosphere, and large dark "scars" on the atmosphere which had lifetimes on the order of weeks."

It is thought the collision of a rather smaller body with the Earth, about 70 million years ago, was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. A few small early mammals survived, but anything as large as a human, would have almost certainly been wiped out.

Comment:


Read More...