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The Map that Changed the World

Map
© ArchiveAn annotated guide to the 1507 map
Drawn half a millennium ago and then swiftly forgotten, one map made us see the world as we know it today... and helped name America. But, as Toby Lester has discovered, the most powerful nation on earth also owes its name to a pun.

Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest leaps in the history of geographical thought - and indeed in the larger history of ideas.

Near the end of an otherwise plodding treatise titled Introduction to Cosmography, they announced to their readers the astonishing news that the world did not just consist of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the three parts of the world known since antiquity. A previously unknown fourth part of the world had recently been discovered, they declared, by the Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci, and in his honour they had decided to give it a name: America.

Telescope

Opening Up A Colourful Cosmic Jewel Box

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© ESOThe FORS1 instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO's Paranal Observatory was used to take this exquisitely sharp close up view of the colourful Jewel Box cluster, NGC 4755. The telescope's huge mirror allowed very short exposure times: just 2.6 seconds through a blue filter (B), 1.3 seconds through a yellow/green filter (V) and 1.3 seconds through a red filter (R). The field of view spans about seven arcminutes.
The combination of images taken by three exceptional telescopes, the ESO Very Large Telescope on Cerro Paranal , the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla observatory and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, has allowed the stunning Jewel Box star cluster to be seen in a whole new light.

Star clusters are among the most visually alluring and astrophysically fascinating objects in the sky. One of the most spectacular nestles deep in the southern skies near the Southern Cross in the constellation of Crux.

The Kappa Crucis Cluster, also known as NGC 4755, or simply the Jewel Box, is just bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye. It was given its nickname by the English astronomer John Herschel in the 1830s because the striking colour contrasts of its pale blue and orange stars seen through a telescope reminded Herschel of a piece of exotic jewellery.

Open clusters such as NGC 4755 typically contain anything from a few to thousands of stars that are loosely bound together by gravity. Because the stars all formed together from the same cloud of gas and dust their ages and chemical makeup are similar, which makes them ideal laboratories for studying how stars evolve.

Eye 2

Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 leaked footage set to ignite controversy

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It's only a computer game. This kind of thing doesn't happen in real life.
Leaked footage from Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 showing the killing of innocent civilians looks likely to renew the debate on video game violence.

The leaked footage from the forthcoming Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 shows the player killing unarmed civilians with a group of terrorists at what looks like LAX airport in Los Angeles.

The scenes are likely to be criticised by family interest groups and media watchdogs and will possibly turn the developer and publisher into the latest lightning rods for video game controversy.

Sherlock

Ancient Sea-Monster Discovered

Monster
© Dorset County Council
British authorities reported that the fossilized skull of a giant sea monster has been discovered off England's Jurassic coast.

The ruthless predator, called a pliosaur, once dominated the oceans 150 million years ago.

The creature's skull, which experts say could belong to one of the largest pliosaurs ever unearthed, had a skull almost 8 feet long and had an overall length of up to 52 feet.

A local collector found the fossil, which has been bought by the Dorset County Council with money from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The fossil comprised of a lower jaw and upper skull, will now be scientifically analyzed and prepared before being publicly displayed at the Dorset County Museum.

Telescope

Fermi Telescope Caps First Year With Glimpse of Space-Time

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© NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT CollaborationThis view of the gamma-ray sky constructed from one year of Fermi LAT observations is the best view of the extreme universe to date. The map shows the rate at which the LAT detects gamma rays with energies above 300 million electron volts - about 120 million times the energy of visible light - from different sky directions. Brighter colors equal higher rates.
During its first year of operations, NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope mapped the extreme sky with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity.

It captured more than 1,000 discrete sources of gamma rays - the highest-energy form of light. Capping these achievements was a measurement that provided rare experimental evidence about the very structure of space and time, unified as space-time in Einstein's theories.

"Physicists would like to replace Einstein's vision of gravity - as expressed in his relativity theories - with something that handles all fundamental forces," said Peter Michelson, principal investigator of Fermi's Large Area Telescope, or LAT, at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. "There are many ideas, but few ways to test them."

Laptop

Controversial Moon Origin Theory Rewrites History

Moon
© NASAA new study challenges the giant impact hypothesis, which suggested the moon formed from a cosmic collision.
The moon may have been adopted by our planet instead of descended from it.

If a new twist on a decades-old theory is right, conditions in the early solar system suggest the moon formed inside Mercury's orbit and migrated out until it was roped into orbit around Earth.

The idea flies in the face of scientific consensus, known as the giant impact hypothesis, which holds that the moon formed from red-hot debris left over after a Mars-sized object collided with Earth around 4.5 billion years ago.

However, the moon has several curious traits that go unexplained with that theory, and Robert Malcuit of Denison University has argued for decades for an alternative view of our moon's history.

Sherlock

Comets Didn't Wipe Out Sabertooths, Early Americans?

Great Lakes
© Jacques DescloitresNorth America's Great Lakes (pictured in an aerial shot on May 4, 2002) were created during glacial retreats and advances over millions of years—including the brief cold snap called the Younger Dryas, which occurred about 12,900 years ago.
A comet impact didn't set off a 1,300-year cold snap that wiped out most life in North America about 12,900 years ago, scientists say.

Though no one disputes the occurrence of the frigid period, known as the Younger Dryas, more and more researchers have been unable to confirm a 2007 finding that says a collision triggered the change.

The earlier study says the drop in temperature, plus fires from the purported impact, wiped out sabertooths, mastodons, and other giant animals, and may have caused the decline of an early civilization known as the Clovis culture.

The 2007 research was based on a combination of archaeological artifacts and extraterrestrial magnetic grains in soil samples found in a thin layer of sediment throughout North America.

The original team, led by Richard Firestone, a nuclear chemist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, also found what he said are traces of charcoal and microscopic bits of carbon from intense fires ignited by the collision.

Blackbox

Monster supernovae may explain Milky Way's mystery haze of radiation

What is causing a mysterious "haze" of radiation at the centre of the Milky Way? It may be a load of monster supernovae kicking out radiation which is then amplified by magnetic stellar winds and turbulence near the galaxy's core.

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© X-ray (NASA/CXC/NCSU/S.Reynolds et al.); Radio (NSF/NRAO/VLA/Cambridge/D.Green et al.); Infrared (2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF/CfA/E.BressertSupernovae such as G1.9+0.3, at the centre of the Milky Way could be responsible for the unexplained "WMAP haze"
In 2003, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe found a patch of particularly energetic microwave radiation in the centre of our galaxy - dubbed the "WMAP haze". It was proposed that this could be caused by collisions of a new type of dark-matter particle.

Instead, the signal could be produced by amplified cosmic rays generated when particularly large stars explode, says Peter Biermann of the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn, Germany, and colleagues.

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© WMAPThe mysterious WMAP haze
The centre of our galaxy has a high number of massive stars compared with elsewhere. These stars are surrounded by particularly strong magnetic stellar winds. At the star's polar regions, the wind's magnetic field is parallel to the direction of travel of any escaping cosmic rays kicked out by the supernova. This configuration - plus the particularly high turbulence in the galactic centre caused by the high concentration of stars - may be increasing the energy of the cosmic rays, says the team. They have submitted the paper to The Astrophysical Journal.

Magnify

10,000-year-old flint found on Coventry allotment

Budding archaeologist Samuel Owens uncovered a 10,000 year old piece of history when he found a segment of flint in his dad's allotment.

The piece has now been identified as coming from the Mesolithic era and is believed to have been used as a type of sharp weapon, possibly for spearing fish.

Samuel, 11, and a pupil at President Kennedy School, had been out with his dad at their allotment in Watery Lane, Keresley, when they made the discovery.

"I just saw it sticking out of the ground when my dad was digging.

Binoculars

Augmented reality system lets you see through walls

If only drivers could see through walls, blind corners and other dangerous road junctions would be much safer. Now an augmented reality system has been built that could just make that come true