Science & TechnologyS


Meteor

Arietid Meteor Shower


Space Weather
Sat, 06 Jun 2009 14:09 UTC
Image
© UnknownThis image shows the area of sky around the Arietid radiant (indicated by a red dot) as seen from mid-northern latitudes at 4 a.m. on June 7th or 8th.
The annual Arietid meteor shower peaks this weekend on Sunday, June 7th. The Arietids are unusual because they are daytime meteors; the shower is most intense after sunrise. Early risers could spot a small number of earthgrazing Arietids during the dark hours before dawn on Sunday morning.

Every year in early June, hundreds of meteors streak across the sky. Most are invisible, though, because the sun is above the horizon while the shower is most intense. These daylight meteors are called the Arietids. They stream from a radiant point in the constellation Aries, which lies just 30 degrees from the Sun in June.

Arietid meteoroids hit Earth's atmosphere with a velocity of 39 km/s (87,000 mph). No one is sure where these meteoroids come from. Possibilities include sungrazing asteroid 1566 Icarus, Comet 96P/Machholz, and the Kreutz family of sungrazing comets. The debris stream is quite broad: Earth is inside it from late May until early July. In most years, the shower peaks on June 7th or 8th.
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Better Earth

Earth's clearest skies revealed

Anil Ananthaswamy
New Scientist
Sat, 06 Jun 2009 13:53 UTC
Image
© Keith Vanderlinde / National Science FoundationThe South Pole Telescope at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. Antarctica has possibly the clearest skies on Earth
Possibly the clearest skies on Earth have been found - but to exploit them, astronomers will have to set up a telescope in one of the planet's harshest climates.

Michael Ashley of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues wanted to find the best sites for astronomy on the Antarctic plateau. Combining observations from satellites and ground stations with climate models, they evaluated different factors that affect telescope vision, such as the amount of water vapour, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence.

The team found that the plateau offers world-beating atmospheric conditions - as long as telescopes are raised above its frozen surface. The ice makes the lowest layers of air on the plateau much colder than those above, forming an "inversion layer" that, together with the strong local winds, can lead to severe turbulence. This would blur a telescope's images.
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Crusader

How to teach science to the pope

Michael Mason
Discover
Sat, 06 Jun 2009 06:48 UTC
Vatican keeps tabs on science, integrates new research into theology

Brother Guy Consolmagno occupies a small space of heaven. A Jesuit brother and astronomer for the Vatican Observatory, he works at the observatory's headquarters at the pope's summer palace in Castel Gandolfo, a 45-minute train ride from Rome.

Castel Gandolfo sits on the high ground of Italy's Lazio region, perched above the exotic, sapphire-blue volcanic Lake Albano. The view you get is magical. "This is a good place for things like an occultation, like the transit of Venus in 2004," Consol­magno says. "We observed the comet hitting Jupiter because the first events were visible only from this part of the world."

Below the observatory's domed chamber are the offices that make up the rest of the Vatican Observatory. One study has bookshelves filled with hardbound journals all the way to the high ceiling. Consolmagno pulls one off a shelf and reads aloud: "Account of a new telescope by Mr. Isaac Newton." He shows me, then smiles. "I think he has a future," he says.
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Chalkboard

Iraqi Teen Solves 300-Year-Old Math Puzzle in 4 Months


Agence France-Presse
Thu, 28 May 2009 04:12 UTC
A 16-year-old Iraqi immigrant living in Sweden has cracked a maths puzzle that has stumped experts for more than 300 years, Swedish media reported on Thursday.

In just four months, Mohamed Altoumaimi has found a formula to explain and simplify the so-called Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of calculations named after the 17th century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, the Dagens Nyheter daily said.

Altoumaimi, who came to Sweden six years ago, said teachers at his high school in Falun, central Sweden were not convinced about his work at first.

"When I first showed it to my teachers, none of them thought the formula I had written down really worked," Altoumaimi told the Falu Kuriren newspaper.
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Cloud Lightning

New Cloud Type Discovered?

Christine Dell'Amore
National Geographic
Sat, 06 Jun 2009 01:40 UTC
Image
These choppy clouds over Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in an undated picture could be examples of the first new type of cloud to be recognized since 1951. Or so hopes Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society.

The British cloud enthusiast said he began getting photos of "dramatic" and "weird" clouds (including the above) in 2005 that he didn't know how to define.
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Info

Unexplained atmospheric chemistry detected

Sid Perkins
Science News
Sat, 06 Jun 2009 01:32 UTC
Unidentified chemical reactions taking place in some polluted air may be a source of hydroxyl radicals, data from a new field study suggest.

Hydroxyl (OH) radicals result from a series of sunlight-stimulated reactions in the atmosphere involving ozone, nitrous acid and hydrogen peroxide. The highly reactive hydroxyl radicals, which typically persist in the air no more than one second before they combine with volatile organic chemicals and other gases, help the atmosphere cleanse itself, says Franz Rohrer, an atmospheric chemist at the Jülich Research Center's Institute for Tropospheric Chemistry in Germany.
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Family

Boys with 'Warrior Gene' More Likely to Join Gangs

LiveScience Staff
Live Science
Sat, 06 Jun 2009 01:03 UTC
Boys who have a so-called "warrior gene" are more likely to join gangs and also more likely to be among the most violent members and to use weapons, a new study finds.

"While gangs typically have been regarded as a sociological phenomenon, our investigation shows that variants of a specific MAOA gene, known as a 'low-activity 3-repeat allele,' play a significant role," said biosocial criminologist Kevin M. Beaver of Florida State University.

In 2006, the controversial warrior gene was implicated in the violence of the indigenous Maori people in New Zealand, a claim that Maori leaders dismissed.
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Info

Apes and humans share a common laughing ancestor

Jeff Hecht
New Scientist
Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:25 UTC
Laughter is not uniquely human. Researchers who tickled 25 juvenile apes - including three human infants - and recorded the sounds they made say that laughter seems to be shared by all great apes. That would mean laughter dates back some 10 to 16 million years, to our common ancestor.

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Info

New 'Molecular Clock' Aids Dating Of Human Migration History


ScienceDaily
Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:51 UTC
Researchers at the University of Leeds have devised a more accurate method of dating ancient human migration - even when no corroborating archaeological evidence exists.

Estimating the chronology of population migrations throughout mankind's early history has always been problematic. The most widely used genetic method works back to find the last common ancestor of any particular set of lineages using samples of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), but this method has recently been shown to be unreliable, throwing 20 years of research into doubt.
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Info

Peru finds human sacrifices from Inca civilization

Marco Aquino
Reuters
Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:46 UTC
Lima - Researchers at an archeological site in northern Peru have made an unusually large discovery of nearly three dozen people sacrificed some 600 years ago by the Incan civilization.

The bodies, some of which show signs of having been cut along their necks and collarbones, were otherwise found in good condition, said Carlos Webster, who is leading excavations at the Chotuna-Chornancap camp.
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