Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Flashback Stone Age satnav: Did ancient man use 5,000-year-old travel chart to navigate across Britain

David Derbyshire
The Daily Mail
Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:07 UTC
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© The Daily MailConnected by triangles: Some of the sites created by Stone Age man (below)
It's considered to be one of the more recent innovations to help the hapless traveller.

But the satnav system may not be as modern as we think.

According to a new theory, prehistoric man navigated his way across England using a similar system based on stone circles and other markers.

The complex network of stones, hill forts and earthworks allowed travellers to trek hundreds of miles with 'pinpoint accuracy' more than 5,000 years ago, amateur historian Tom Brooks says. The grid covered much of southern England and Wales and included landmarks such as Stonehenge and Silbury Hill, claims Mr Brooks, a retired marketing executive of Honiton, Devon.
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Bulb

Coochee coo! Monkey mothers 'go gaga' over their babies just like humans


The Daily Mail
Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:00 UTC
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© Rex Features LTD/ Sipa PressA mother Rhesus Macaque with her cubs in China. Researchers found the monkey mothers spent long periods gazing at their babies and smacking them kisses
Monkey mothers go as gooey over their babies as humans, scientist have found.

Scientists who studied 14 pairs of rhesus macaque mothers and their infants were surprised by the human-like way they interacted.

Mothers and babies spent more time gazing at each other than other monkeys. The mothers also blew kisses at their infants by smacking their lips - and often the infants kissed back.
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Sun

Bursting the Sun's Bubble

David L. Chandler
MIT News Office
Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:01 UTC
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© Southwest Research InstituteThe IBEX satellite maps the boundary layer of the sun's bubble, or heliosheath. This map shows this data plotted on an all-sky image, revealing the bright ribbon-like structure (in greens, yellows and reds) swirling across the sky.
New observations indicate the heliosphere - the sun's sphere of influence - has a different shape than theorists had expected.

The sun's environment in interstellar space - the heliosphere - is essentially a bubble that encompasses the entire solar system and has a diameter about 100 times the distance from the Earth to the sun. This region, in which the solar wind dominates before it smashes into the surrounding galactic gas and dust, was supposed to look something like the shape of a comet: a region pushed inward on one side and streaming outward on the other. But a new NASA orbiting observatory designed to study this vast zone found something completely different.

Our sun's sphere of influence, according to a series of papers published in Science on Oct. 16 detailing the initial results from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite, seems instead to be a bubble that is cinched at the waist by a vast ribbon as seen by energetic neutral atoms - atoms that are not electrically charged, but are moving very fast through space - that are glowing 10 times more brightly than anyone had expected from anything in this region called the heliosphere. The textbook descriptions of the heliosphere, according to Science's accompanying news story, will have to be entirely rewritten.
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Arrow Up

Scientists grow mice heart muscle strip that beats

Lauran Neergaard
Associated Press
Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:41 UTC
Scientists have grown a piece of heart muscle - and then watched it beat - by using stem cells from a mouse embryo, a big step toward one day repairing damage from heart attacks. Think of Dr. Kenneth Chien as a heart mechanic. "We're making a heart part and (eventually) we're going to put the part in," is how he describes the work by his team of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital researchers.

Lots of work remains before trying that dramatic an experiment in people. But regenerating damaged heart muscle is a holy grail in cardiac care.
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Info

Quantum computer chips now one step closer to quantum reality

Pam Frost Gorder
Research News
Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:40 UTC
Columbus, Ohio -- In the quest for smaller, faster computer chips, researchers are increasingly turning to quantum mechanics -- the exotic physics of the small.

The problem: the manufacturing techniques required to make quantum devices have been equally exotic.

That is, until now.

Researchers at Ohio State University have discovered a way to make quantum devices using technology common to the chip-making industry today.
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Bulb

Aramaic: Technology brings new insights to ancient language


The University of Chicago
Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:40 UTC
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© Oriental Institute, University of ChicagoTablets uncovered at Persepolis in Iran are covered with writing in Aramaic. The archive, being studied at the University of Chicago, provides new insights on the language, which has been written and spoken in the Middle East continuously since ancient times.
New technologies and academic collaborations are helping scholars at the University of Chicago analyze hundreds of ancient documents in Aramaic, one of the Middle East's oldest continuously spoken and written languages.

Members of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California are helping the University's Oriental Institute make very high-quality electronic images of nearly 700 Aramaic administrative documents. The Aramaic texts were incised in the surfaces of clay tablets with styluses or inked on the tablets with brushes or pens. Some tablets have both incised and inked texts.
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Meteor

Mars Rover Spots Another Meteorite


Space.com
Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:10 UTC
NASA's intrepid Mars rover Opportunity has found yet another meteorite on the surface of the red planet.

Opportunity stumbled upon this new meteorite, dubbed "Shelter Island," less than three weeks after driving away from a larger meteorite that the rover examined for six weeks.

The rover began its approach to the meteorite with a 92-foot (28-meter) backwards drive on Oct. 1, the rover's 2,022nd day on Mars.

Opportunity and its twin rover Spirit - which is currently embedded in a soft spot of soil called Troy - have been on the Martian surface for more than five years.
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Telescope

NASA Spacecraft Provides Our First View of Our Place in the Galaxy


SpaceRef.com
Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:00 UTC
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© NASA
NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, spacecraft has made it possible for scientists to construct the first comprehensive sky map of our solar system and its location in the Milky Way galaxy. The new view will change the way researchers view and study the interaction between our galaxy and sun.

The sky map was produced with data that two detectors on the spacecraft collected during six months of observations. The detectors measured and counted particles scientists refer to as energetic neutral atoms.

The energetic neutral atoms are created in an area of our solar system known as the interstellar boundary region. This region is where charged particles from the sun, called the solar wind, flow outward far beyond the orbits of the planets and collide with material between stars. The energetic neutral atoms travel inward toward the sun from interstellar space at velocities ranging from 100,000 mph to more than 2.4 million mph. This interstellar boundary emits no light that can be collected by conventional telescopes.

The new map reveals the region that separates the nearest reaches of our galaxy, called the local interstellar medium, from our heliosphere -- a protective bubble that shields and protects our solar system from most of the dangerous cosmic radiation traveling through space.
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Bulb

Flashback Object Permanence: An intriguing connection between dogs and humans

Meg Marquardt
Examiner
Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:27 UTC
Your canine may not be so different from your infant. A famous psychological experiment showed that infants will almost always look for an object in its initial hiding place even if they've seen it moved somewhere new. A recent experiment shows dogs make the same bizarre mistake.

In the experiment, published this week in Science, an adult talks to the infant or dog as they hide the object. After a few trials, the adult moves the object. Both subjects will continue to search for the object in the first location even though they've seen it hidden somewhere new. The vocal interactions are key, for if they are not present, both babies and dogs make fewer mistakes.
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Meteor

Giant Impact Near India - Not Mexico - May Have Doomed Dinosaurs


ScienceDaily
Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:00 UTC
A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a new study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago.

Mumbai Offshore Basin
© Geological Society Of AmericaThree-dimensional reconstruction of the submerged Shiva crater (~500 km diameter) at the Mumbai Offshore Basin, western shelf of India from different cross-sectional and geophysical data.
Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of researchers took a close look at the massive Shiva basin, a submerged depression west of India that is intensely mined for its oil and gas resources. Some complex craters are among the most productive hydrocarbon sites on the planet. Chatterjee will present his research at this month's Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon.

"If we are right, this is the largest crater known on our planet," Chatterjee said. "A bolide of this size, perhaps 40 kilometers (25 miles) in diameter creates its own tectonics."

By contrast, the object that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, and is commonly thought to have killed the dinosaurs was between 8 and 10 kilometers (5 and 6.2 miles) wide.
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