Trevor Cox reveals how the acoustic footprint of the world's most famous prehistoric monument was measured
Science & Technology
© Bertrand Gardel/Getty
Easy on the ears as well as on the eyes.
Easy on the ears as well as on the eyes.
"The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No other sound came from it... Overhead something made the black sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast architrave uniting the pillars horizontally. They entered carefully beneath and between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they seemed to be still out of doors..."
This atmospheric description of a "temple of the winds" comes from the dramatic climax of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The setting is Stonehenge, arguably the most famous prehistoric monument of all. Its imposing ring of standing stones is visible for miles on Salisbury plain in southern England. On the day of the summer solstice its outlying "Heelstone" is exactly in line with rays of the rising sun. A more perfect example of the visual impact of an ancient monument would be hard to find.
Might we be missing here something that both Hardy and our prehistoric ancestors understood? Some archaeologists have begun to think so. They argue that sound effects were an important, perhaps even decisive, factor in how early humans chose and built their dwellings and sacred places. Caves that sing, Mayan temples that chirp, burial mounds that hum: they all add up to evidence that the aural, and not just the visual, determined the building codes of the past. But is that sound science?
On August 26th, the two brightest objects in the night sky got together for a spectacular conjunction. Tom Cocchiaro reports from Portsmouth, New Hampshire: "I went outside just after midnight to get some mail I had forgotten and--BOOM! There they were, the moon and Jupiter wedged between two tall maple trees like something from 2001 A Space Odyssey." He grabbed his new Canon T2i and recorded the scene:
Readers, did you miss it? An even better version of this conjunction occurs next month. The Moon and Jupiter will meet again on Sept. 22nd when the Moon is full and Jupiter simultaneously reaches an 11-year peak in brightness. Mark your calendar!
© Tom Cocchiaro
Readers, did you miss it? An even better version of this conjunction occurs next month. The Moon and Jupiter will meet again on Sept. 22nd when the Moon is full and Jupiter simultaneously reaches an 11-year peak in brightness. Mark your calendar!
© New Solar Telescope (NST)
Sunspot 1084 - up close
Sunspot 1084 - up close
"For perspective," he adds, "Earth is slightly smaller than the whole sunspot including the dark umbra and the daisy petal-like penumbra. The spot is surrounded by the sun's ubiquitous granular field [which shows the boiling motions of the sun's surface]."
Researchers believe that high-resolution studies of sunspots can help them understand how sunspots evolve and anticipate when they're about to erupt. "Next year, we plan to upgrade the telescope with a much higher-order adaptive optics system to get even better images," says Gorceix.
© CERN
AMS-02 began the first stage of its voyage to the International Space Station from Geneva international airport, in Switzerland.
AMS-02 began the first stage of its voyage to the International Space Station from Geneva international airport, in Switzerland.
The antimatter hunter AMS-02 began the first stage of its voyage to the International Space Station (ISS) from Geneva international airport, in Switzerland. During a ceremony organised by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the experiment was loaded onto the US Air Force Galaxy transport aircraft that carried it to Cape Canaveral.
AMS-02 will not only be the largest scientific instrument to be installed on the ISS, but it could also be considered the result of the largest international collaboration for a single experiment in space.
Even before its launch, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has already been hailed as a success with more than a decade of work and cooperation between 56 institutes from 16 different countries. The AMS-02 experiment is led by Nobel Prize Laureate Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
© Scharmer et al/Royal Sweedish Academy of Sciences/SPL
Influential beasts
Influential beasts
There are already explanations for why the exact length of a day varies. Changes in winds and ocean currents cause the Earth's spin to slow slightly or speed up to compensate, preserving the planet's total angular momentum. Meanwhile, shifts in how matter is distributed around the planet due to climate change may also affect the speed of Earth's spin.
The latest association, between sunspots, whose abundance rises and falls on an 11-year "solar cycle", and the Earth's spin rate, is perhaps the most bizarre yet.
Researchers have long observed that the spin rate fluctuates with the seasons, in response to shifting wind patterns. Now, a team led by Jean-Louis Le Mouël at the Paris Institute of Geophysics in France has found that this seasonal effect also grows and shrinks in an 11-year cycle, rather like sunspots. Seasons have a bigger effect on spin rate when sunspots are scarce, and a smaller effect when spots are abundant, according to an analysis of data from 1962 to 2009 (Geophysical Research Letters, vol 37, L15307).
© Science Museum; H. Parks/Jila
A model of Henry Cavendish’s torsion balance (left) and its latest successor, a laser interferometer.
A model of Henry Cavendish’s torsion balance (left) and its latest successor, a laser interferometer.
But the relentless honing of G may have hit a stumbling block. Two recent experiments are in striking disagreement with earlier findings, and the overall uncertainty in the value of the constant may be set to increase.
In Newton's equations of gravity, G represents the size of the gravitational force. The constant is involved in the quest to unify the theories of gravity and quantum mechanics, and efforts to determine G have contributed to progress in areas of experimental physics: elements of the apparatus first developed to measure the constant, for example, are now used in gravitational-wave detectors. But for some researchers, measuring G is an end in itself. "It's the ultimate precision experiment," says James Faller, a physicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
© ESO
The new planetary system has as many as seven planets orbiting a sun-like star.
The new planetary system has as many as seven planets orbiting a sun-like star.
If confirmed, the discovery by a European team, led by Christophe Lovis from Geneva University, represents "the richest" system of exo-planets - planets outside our own solar system - ever found.
This remarkable discovery highlights the fact that we are now entering a new era in exo-planet research, said Lovis.
"This shows that we are able to detect complex systems of small planets, which opens up huge perspectives, as these systems are probably very numerous," the lead researcher told swissinfo.ch.
© AFP/Getty Images
This artist rendition obtained from NASA shows Saturn-sized planets orbiting a distant star about 2,000 light years from Earth.
This artist rendition obtained from NASA shows Saturn-sized planets orbiting a distant star about 2,000 light years from Earth.
This is "the first discovery of multiple planets orbiting the same star" by looking for such transits, said William Borucki, the science principal investigator for the Kepler Mission. He spoke in a teleconference from the NASA Ames Research Center in California.
The sun-like star, designated Kepler-9, is about 2,000 light years away in the constellation Lyra, he said.
The two planets, named Kepler-9b and 9c, show a clear gravitational interaction, according to NASA. But while scientists hope Kepler will find Earth-like planets, these two do not qualify. In addition to being much larger than Earth, they are much too close to the star they are orbiting.
"The habitable zone is actually quite far out from these stars," Borucki said. These planets "are very, very hot."
© Unknown
The Back to the Future trilogy featured many cool things we all hoped to some day own for ourselves. Whether it was something as high-tech as hoverboards, or as simple as shoes that would lace themselves, there was plenty for us to dream about for the future.
Though hover-skateboards will probably take a bit longer, we may see those self-lacing shoes in time for 2015. Nike has filed for a patent for self-lacing shoes, complete with a charging station. Sure, not every patent filed means we can expect to see the product on the shelves, but we really hope Nike makes these shoes a reality. Who wouldn't want a pair of Marty McFlys?
