Science & TechnologyS


Einstein

Intelligent soldiers most likely to die in battle

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:28 UTC
Being dumb has its benefits. Scottish soldiers who survived the second world war were less intelligent than men who gave their lives defeating the Third Reich, a new study of British government records concludes.

The 491 Scots who died and had taken IQ tests at age 11 achieved an average IQ score of 100.8. Several thousand survivors who had taken the same test - which was administered to all Scottish children born in 1921 - averaged 97.4.

The unprecedented demands of the second world war - fought more with brains than with brawn compared with previous wars - might account for the skew, says Ian Deary, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, who led the study. Dozens of other studies have shown that smart people normally live longer than their less intelligent peers.
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Satellite

Mars lander updates Twitter users with 'tweets'


Agence France-Presse
Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:56 UTC
If the Phoenix Lander comes back to life on Mars, Twitter users could be among the first to know.

NASA gave the historic Space Age mission an Internet Age spin by adding a Twitter page, enabling the robotic interplanetary explorer to answer the hot micro-blogging website's trademark query: "What are you doing?"

Twitter rocketed to popularity with technology that lets people use mobile telephones or personal computers to continually keep friends updated on their activities with "tweets," text messages of no more than 140 characters.
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Satellite

Mars had climate change


InTheNews.co.uk
Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:51 UTC
Mars
© NASA
Mars has been through major climate changes, similar to the Earth's ice age, scientists have discovered. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) found evidence of ancient climate change on Mars caused by regular variation in the planet's tilt, or obliquity.

On Earth, a similar astronomical effect drives ice-age cycles.

The researchers used a high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to measure the layering on rock outcrops in four craters on the planet. Based on the analysis, the scientists concluded each layer was formed over a period of about 100,000 years and was produced by the same cyclical climate changes.
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Telescope

Burrowing black holes devoured first stars from within

David Shiga
New Scientist
Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:28 UTC
Image
© SPL
Swarms of tiny black holes forged in the big bang may have killed off the universe's first stars by devouring them from within. The digested end-products could then have grown into the colossal black holesMovie Camera now lurking in the centres of galaxies, whose origins have long been a mystery.

Some physicists speculate that minuscule black holes may have been forged in the very dense soup of matter and radiation that prevailed in the first moments of the universe's existence. If so, these might account for at least some of the invisible dark matter that pervades the universe.

Now Cosimo Bambi of the University of Tokyo in Japan and colleagues have shown that these black holes could also have destroyed the universe's first stars by eating them from the inside out.

The first stars are thought to have formed around 200 million years after the big bang, in the centres of the universe's densest dark matter clumps. Stars would have been most likely to ignite there because the dark matter's gravity would have pulled in the gas necessary for them to form.
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Info

Habitable Planets: Four Types Proposed

Lee Pullen
Astrobiology Magazine
Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:54 UTC
Planet
© Unknown
The origin of life and the habitability of worlds other than Earth are two of the biggest mysteries facing science today. Much research has been dedicated to these topics, but there is still a lack of definite answers.

Jan Hendrik Bredehöft from the UK's Open University has been considering habitability on other worlds. "I'm one of those guys who takes a piece of meteorite, grinds it up and finds out what the organic chemistry is in there," said Bredehöft.

Based on these types of studies, he has come to believe that habitable worlds can be split into four categories, each with varying likelihoods of being home to extraterrestrial organisms. This has great potential for assisting the search for life in the universe, particularly as technology is now progressing to the stage where direct imaging of extrasolar planets is possible. Bredehöft presented his ideas at Europlanet's latest Planetary Science Congress.
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Satellite

Discovery Indicates Mars Was Habitable

Andrea Thompson
Space.com
Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:46 UTC
Evidence of a key mineral on Mars has been found at several locations on the planet's surface, suggesting that any microbial life that might have been there back when the planet was wetter could have lived comfortably.

The findings offer up intriguing new sites for future missions to probe, researchers said.

Observations made by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which just completed its primary mission and started a second two-year shift, found evidence of carbonates, which don't survive in conditions hostile to life, indicating that not all of the planet's ancient watery environments were as harsh as previously thought.
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Better Earth

Earth Not Center Of The Universe, Surrounded By 'Dark Energy'


Science Daily
Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:47 UTC
Earth's location in the Universe is utterly unremarkable, despite recent theories that propose toppling a foundation of modern cosmology, according to a team of University of British Columbia researchers.

Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus's 1543 book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, moved Earth from being the centre of the Universe to just another planet orbiting the Sun. Since then, astronomers have extended the idea and formed the Copernican Principle, which says that our place in the Universe as a whole is completely ordinary. Although the Copernican Principle has become a pillar of modern cosmology, finding conclusive evidence that our neighbourhood of the Universe really isn't special has proven difficult.
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Ark

Ancient Mass Graves of Soldiers, Babies Found in Italy

Maria Cristina Valsecchi
National Geographic News
Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:22 UTC
mass grave
© National Geographic

More than 10,000 graves containing ancient amphorae, "baby bottles," and the bodies of soldiers who fought the Carthaginians were found near the ancient Greek colony of Himera, in Italy, archaeologists announced recently. (See photos.)

"It's probably the largest Greek necropolis in Sicily," said Stefano Vassallo, the lead archaeologist of the team that made the discoveries, in September.
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Ark

Archeologists unearth ancient city in Peru

Dana Ford
Reuters
Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:13 UTC
Lima - Researchers digging at the Cerro Patapo archeological site in northern Peru have discovered the ruins of an entire city, which may provide the "missing link" between two ancient cultures, investigators said on Tuesday.
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Magnify

How Mosquitoes Avoid Succumbing To Viruses They Transmit


ScienceDaily
Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:31 UTC
Mosquitoes are like Typhoid Mary. They can spread viruses which cause West Nile fever, dengue fever, or yellow fever without themselves getting sick. Scientists long thought that the mosquito didn't care whether it had a virus hitchhiker, but have now discovered, "There is a war going on," said Zach Adelman, assistant professor of entomology at Virginia Tech.

The war is at the cellular level, between the host and invading RNA - the strands of code that produce different kinds of viral proteins.

The mediators that balance the interactions between mosquito and virus are virus-derived short-interfering RNAs (viRNAs), which are generated by the mosquito's immune response to infection. "If the mosquito is not able to cut up the virus genome into viRNAs, an otherwise invisible infection becomes fatal-- for both the mosquito and the virus. In other words, to complete the circle and be transmitted back to a vertebrate host, the virus must submit, to some extent, to the mosquito's antiviral response," said Kevin M. Myles, assistant professor of entomology at Virginia Tech.
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