Science & TechnologyS


Better Earth

Key photosynthesis step replicated: Scientists learn from nature to split water into hydrogen and oxygen


ScienceDaily
Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:33 UTC
An international team of researchers led by Monash University has used chemicals found in plants to replicate a key process in photosynthesis paving the way to a new approach that uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The breakthrough could revolutionise the renewable energy industry by making hydrogen - touted as the clean, green fuel of the future - cheaper and easier to produce on a commercial scale.
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Bizarro Earth

Military funds mind-reading science

Alicia Chang
The Associated Press
Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:11 UTC
Here's a mind-bending idea: The U.S. military is paying scientists to study ways to read people's thoughts. The hope is that the research could someday lead to a gadget capable of translating the thoughts of soldiers who suffered brain injuries in combat or even stroke patients in hospitals.

Comment: Just to help the sick and injured... Right...


But the research also raises concerns that such mind-reading technology could be used to interrogate the enemy.
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Magnify

Shroud of Turin stirs new controversy

DeeDee Correll
Los Angeles Times
Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:47 UTC
A Colorado couple researching the shroud dispute radiocarbon dating of the alleged burial cloth of Jesus, and Oxford has agreed to help them reexamine the findings.

Shroud of Turin
©Ellen Jaskol / The Times
A life-sized illuminated photograph of the Shroud of Turin, believed by some--including John and Rebecca Jackson--to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.
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Sherlock

Gene Hunt Hints at Cause of Bipolar Disorder

Nicholas Wade
The New York Times
Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:30 UTC
A gene hunt among more than 4,000 British, Irish and American patients suffering from bipolar disorder has turned up two genes that put new emphasis on a possible cause of the disease.

bibolar gene hunting
©Times
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Meteor

First object seen from solar system's inner Oort cloud

Jeff Hecht
NewScientist.com
Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:40 UTC
Add yet another new class of objects to the solar system's growing bestiary - the first known visitor from the inner part of the Oort cloud. Many comets originate in the outer Oort cloud, a shell of icy bodies that surrounds the main part of the solar system.

2006 SQ372
©Illustration: N Kaib
No known object has a similar orbit to 2006 SQ372. Sedna, the fifth-largest object beyond Neptune, has an elongated orbit stretching nearly 1000 times farther from the Sun than the Earth, but it never comes closer to the Sun than 75 AU. 2006 SQ372, on the other hand, comes within 24 AU of the Sun, putting it in a different dynamical category
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Info

Direct Evidence Of Dark Energy In Supervoids And Superclusters


Space Daily
Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:25 UTC
A team of astronomers at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA) led by Dr. Istvan Szapudi has found direct evidence for the existence of "dark energy." Dark energy works against the tendency of gravity to pull galaxies together and so causes the universe's expansion to speed up.

superclusters
©B. Granett, M. Neyrinck, I. Szapudi
The UH team compared directions in the sky where they found superclusters (red circles) and supervoids (blue circles) with the strength of the Cosmic Microwave Background. Superclusters are more likely to coincide with directions where microwaves are unusually strong (red or orange coloring) and supervoids with directions where the microwaves are unusually weak (blue coloring).

The nature of dark energy (what precisely it is, and why it exists) is one of the biggest puzzles of modern science.

This is arguably the clearest detection to date of dark energy's stretching effect on vast cosmic structures: there is only a one in 200,000 chance that the detection would occur by chance.
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Info

Cosmic Voids Were Emptied By Gravity


Space Daily
Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:19 UTC
The largest 3-dimensional maps of the universe show that galaxies lie in filamentary superclusters interlaced by vast zones of emptiness, cosmic voids tens of millions of light years across that contain few or no bright galaxies.

Image
©M. Blanton and the SDSS
A map of the distribution of galaxies in a thin wedge on the sky, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II). The earth is at the vertex of the wedge, and the most distant objects shown are 1.3 billion light years away. Red points mark galaxies whose light is dominated by old stars, while blue points show galaxies with younger populations of stars. Galaxies are arrayed in clumps, filaments, and sheets, which are interweaved with bubbles and tunnels, the cosmic voids.

Researchers analyzing the two largest maps, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II) and the Two-Degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS), have concluded that these voids are also missing the "halos" of invisible dark matter that bright galaxies reside in.

"Astronomers have wondered for a quarter-century whether these voids were 'too big' or 'too empty' to be explained by gravity alone," said University of Chicago researcher Jeremy Tinker, who led the new study. "Our analysis shows that the voids in these surveys are exactly as big and as empty as predicted by the 'standard' theory of the universe."
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Bulb

US: Fuel cells eyed for energy storage

Jim Efstathiou, Jr. and Jeremy van Loon
Bloomberg News
Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:02 UTC
A new, cheaper way to store electricity to run air conditioners or vehicles promises to make solar power competitive with traditional generation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers said.

The discovery might shatter the biggest barrier to widespread use of solar power, namely that it's unavailable after dark, said Daniel Nocera, an MIT energy professor. The process uses nontoxic natural materials to convert sunlight into gases, as described Thursday in the online version of Science.

Electricity produced from sun rays by photovoltaic cells costs about four times as much as power from conventional coal-fired generators. The higher expense of storing solar power in batteries has undercut its acceptance as a dependable source of renewable energy.

Cheaply storing energy from sun rays would mean ''you've answered everything,'' said Kevin Book, senior energy analyst for Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co., before the study was published. For solar power, ''It's the difference between being on the sidelines and being the quarterback,'' he said.
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Evil Rays

Can companies beam advertisements into your brain?

John Fuller
How Stuff Works
Sun, 17 Aug 2008 21:46 UTC
If you have an account with online vendor Amazon.com, when you open up the site's home page a short bit of text at the top greets you. It might say, for example, "Hello, Tim. We have recommendations for you." One click will lead you to another page with a list of products related to your past purchases. Although this feature isn't particularly intrusive and only exists on a Web page, are there any examples like this in brick-and-mortar stores?

Image
©Holosonics
An Audio Spotlight system by Holosonics

While we aren't aware of any advertising technologies out there that transmit holographic images into your brain to personally greet you and offer new products, one emerging technique works with sound to capture customers' attention. This technology, developed by Holosonics, has introduced a directional speaker unit that many retail chains are currently testing for use in their stores. Instead of blasting music and announcements from an omnidirectional public-address system, directional loudspeakers -- or Audio Spotlight systems, as Holosonics calls them -- make sound audible only in certain designated locations.
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Telescope

Cassini Pinpoints Source Of Jets On Saturn's Moon Enceladus


Science Daily
Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:59 UTC
In a feat of interplanetary sharpshooting, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has pinpointed precisely where the icy jets erupt from the surface of Saturn's geologically active moon Enceladus.

Enceladus
©NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
This sweeping mosaic of Saturn's moon Enceladus provides broad regional context for the ultra-sharp, close-up views NASA's Cassini spacecraft acquired minutes earlier, during its flyby on Aug. 11, 2008.

New carefully targeted pictures reveal exquisite details in the prominent south polar "tiger stripe" fractures from which the jets emanate. The images show the fractures are about 300 meters (980 feet) deep, with V-shaped inner walls. The outer flanks of some of the fractures show extensive deposits of fine material. Finely fractured terrain littered with blocks of ice tens of meters in size and larger (the size of small houses) surround the fractures.

"This is the mother lode for us," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo. "A place that may ultimately reveal just exactly what kind of environment -- habitable or not -- we have within this tortured little moon."
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