Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Earliest Chemical Warfare Felled Roman Fort

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:55 UTC
The Lone Persian
© Discovery newsThe Lone Persian

A cramped tunnel beneath a Middle Eastern fort might have produced the oldest evidence of chemical warfare, according to a CSI-style review of archival records.

Presented at the recent meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, the review focused on the dramatic remains of 20 Roman soldiers unearthed in the 1930s in the city of Dura-Europos, Syria.

Sitting on a cliff overlooking the Euphrates River, the Roman fort at Dura was the site of a violent siege by the powerful Persian Empire around 256 A.D.

No historical record of the battle exists, but archaeological remains have helped piece together the action.
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Magnify

Entangled Particles Face Sudden Death

Eric Bland
Discovery News
Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:29 UTC
entangled particles
© Discovery NewsPrepare for Sudden Death
Two particles can become entangled so completely that a change in one immediately affects the other, no matter how far away it is. Until now, scientists have assumed such a marriage would endure forever.

But in a paper published today in the journal Science, two physicists show that entangled particles can suddenly and irrevocably lose their connection, a phenomenon called Entanglement Sudden Death, or ESD.

"The degree of information entangled can disappear faster than the information itself," said Joseph Eberly, a physicist at the University of Rochester, who, along with Ting Yu, co-authored the paper. "It's completely non-classical physics."
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Display

Google Creates Momentary Panic by Labeling All Sites Harmful


PhysOrg
Sat, 31 Jan 2009 18:23 UTC
Google
© Google
The search engine Google sparked online panic Saturday when a glitch in its security program temporarily prevented users from visiting any websites in search results.

Between 1430 and 1525 GMT, all search results were marked as harmful and users received the message: "Warning! This site may harm your computer."

"What happened? Very simply, human error," Goggle vice president for search products and user experience Marissa Mayer said on the company's official blog.
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Better Earth

Alberta sun temple has 5,000-year-old calendar

Bob Weber
The Canadian Press
Sat, 31 Jan 2009 02:58 UTC
Image
© The Canadian PressAn aerial view of a 5,000-year-old stone cairn and other structures in southern Alberta that a maverick Edmonton scientist believes are the central features of an ancient sun temple and calendar that accurately marks the solstices and the equinoxes.

Edmonton - An academic maverick is challenging conventional wisdom on Canada's prehistory by claiming an archeological site in southern Alberta is really a vast, open-air sun temple with a precise 5,000-year-old calendar predating England's Stonehenge and Egypt's pyramids.

Mainstream archeologists consider the rock-encircled cairn to be just another medicine wheel left behind by early aboriginals. But a new book by retired University of Alberta professor Gordon Freeman says it is in fact the centre of a 26-square-kilometre stone ''lacework" that marks the changing seasons and the phases of the moon with greater accuracy than our current calendar.
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R2-D2

NASA: Mars Rover Is in "Good Health" after Memory Error

Alexander Toldt
eFlux Media
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:01 UTC
Mars rover
© Unknown
Spirit, one of the two NASA rovers that have been roaming Mars's surface during the past five years, has encountered some memory glitches, but will be back on track as soon as this weekend. The Spirit, the first rover NASA sent on Mars (on 3 January, 2004), surprised engineers when it lost memory and aborted a drive last Sunday.

NASA engineers still wonder what could have caused the memory loss, but there's no need to worry about Spirit, which is doing "pretty good," as William Nelson, chief of the engineering team for NASA's Mars rovers, said. Although the two rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) were not expected to last more than three months on the unfavorable surface of the Red Planet and after five years the two complex machines are still in activity, the engineers at NASA are still wondering what could have caused the memory loss.
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Sherlock

Simple Genetic Mechanism may be Behind the Origin of Species


PhysOrg
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:00 UTC
Some of the secrets behind the emergence of new species have been uncovered in a genetic study, conducted in collaboration with bioscientists at The University of Nottingham.

Almost all plant species are known to have cross-breeds that sometimes produce infertile offspring. Now for the first time the team, led by the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, INRA-Versailles, has identified a simple genetic mechanism that may explain why this happens. The results have been published in the journal Science.

Professor Malcolm Bennett, Biology Director for the Centre for Plant Integrative Biology and Head of Division of Plant and Crop Sciences at The University of Nottingham said: "As plants evolve, their genes may get copied, moved around the genome, and inactivated. This will reduce the possibilities for fertile cross-breeds and, over time, may result in the emergence of distinct species. We're delighted that this study demonstrates this process in action."
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Magnify

Scientists Discover Ground-Breaking Material: Graphane


PhysOrg
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:55 UTC
Graphane crystal
© UnknownGraphane crystal. This novel two-dimensional material is obtained from graphene (a monolayer of carbon atoms) by attaching hydrogen atoms (red) to each carbon atoms (blue) in the crystal.
Researchers at The University of Manchester have produced a ground-breaking new material, graphane, which has been derived from graphene.

Graphene, which was discovered at the University in 2004, is a one-atom-thick crystal with unusual highly conductive properties, which has quickly become one of the hottest topics in physics and materials science. It is also tipped for a number of future applications in electronics and photonics.

But research published today (Friday 30 January, 2009) by Professor Andre Geim and Dr Kostya Novoselov, who led the group that discovered graphene in 2004, suggests its uses could be far greater.
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Satellite

Hydrocarbon Rains May Fill Titan Lakes


PhysOrg
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:14 UTC
Cassini
© NASAAn updated map of Saturn's moon Titan.
A region on Saturn's moon Titan's southern latitudes appears to have been flooded by a summer cloudburst of hydrocarbon rain, as seen in images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft taken before and after a large storm system was observed.

Recent images of Titan from NASA's Cassini spacecraft affirm the presence of lakes of liquid hydrocarbons by capturing changes in the lakes brought on by rainfall.
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Sherlock

Malaysia Says 1.8 million-Year-Old Axes Unearthed

Julia Zappei
The Associated Press
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:18 UTC
Malaysian archeologists have unearthed prehistoric stone axes that they said Friday were the world's oldest at about 1.8 million years old.

Seven axes were found with other tools at an excavation site in Malaysia's northern Perak state in June, and tests by a Tokyo laboratory indicate they were about 1.83 million years old, said Mokhtar Saidin, director of the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Science Malaysia.

The group released their conclusions Thursday, and other archeologists have not yet examined the results.
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Control Panel

New, Unusual Semiconductor is a Switch-Hitter

Laura Mgrdichian
PhysOrg
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:33 UTC
A research group in Germany has discovered a semiconducting material that can switch its semiconducting properties -- turning from one type of semiconductor to another -- via a simple change in temperature. This intriguing behavior may make the material useful in efforts to create better performing integrated circuits, which form the backbone of almost all electronic devices.

Semiconductors are essential to integrated circuits, and any significant advances in semiconductor materials could mean big changes for the future of electronic technologies. For example, this new finding may further developments in data-storage technology. At a more fundamental level, the material could change how semiconductor chips are designed.

"This new material may be able to help simplify chip production in the future," the study's corresponding researcher, chemist Tom Nilges of the University of Muenster, in Germany, said to PhysOrg.com. "Instead of using two materials to build transistors for integrated circuits, there is now a reasonable chance that this job could be performed by a single material."
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