Science & Technology
Earth's Magnetic Field Hisses Due to Distant "Chorus"
Thousands of miles above Earth, a cosmic chorus is filling the heavens with a mysterious, low frequency "hiss."
That's the conclusion of scientists studying data from a set of NASA probes designed to monitor substorms - dramatic exchanges of energy among charged particles that spark the auroras at Earth's poles.
The charged particles come from the sun and get trapped in loops around our planet by Earth's magnetic field.
© NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Mercury's Horizon as seen from the Messenger Spacecraft
Scientists crunching data from the January and October 2008 Messenger flybys of Mercury have just announced a flurry of new results.These findings, announced in a NASA press briefing last week and in four papers in the May 1st Science, show a planet racked by magnetic flux, bombarded by the solar wind, and covered in ancient lava.
During the October flyby, Messenger imaged around 30% of Mercury's surface never seen by spacecraft before. Researchers discovered a well-preserved, 430-mile-wide impact basin, recently named Rembrandt, thought to date to the period around 4 billion years ago when large asteroids were pummeling the inner planet
Alastair Sharp
ReutersFri, 08 May 2009 01:13 UTC
Qantara, Egypt - A military garrison of mud-brick and seashells unearthed in Egypt's Sinai desert may be key to finding a web of pharaonic-era defenses at the northeast gateway to ancient Egypt, archaeologists said on Thursday.
Archaeologists who discovered the 3,500-year-old garrison, where up to 50,000 soldiers could be posted in times of heightened tensions, say they hope inscriptions at Luxor's Karnak temple may serve as a guide to finding other outposts.
But knowing the location of the garrison at the ancient city of Tharu, in a formerly fertile area of Egypt where a branch of the Nile river once met the Mediterranean Sea, is key to understanding where to start looking.
David Gewirtz
CNN.comThu, 07 May 2009 04:42 UTC
Sometimes, seeing the future requires a certain suspension of disbelief. In this case, a popular video game might provide important lessons about how to respond to a pandemic - and what might go wrong.
If you haven't heard of (or played) World of Warcraft, consider that its more than 11.5 million paying subscribers outnumber the populations of Israel and Ireland - combined.
World of Warcraft is a "massive multiplayer online role-playing game" and that's how this story of gamers and pandemic prediction begins. In WoW, thousands of real human beings log in and interact with one another, solving problems, fighting monsters, trading goods, teaming up in guilds - all in a very large, ongoing fantasy world.
Each human player is represented in the game by a cartoon alter-ego, each with unique skills, abilities, and comparative power. I, for example, play a level 71 warlock of the Horde. My wife has a level 71 priest, which is what healers are called in the game. When we play together, I tend to fight the bad monsters and she heals me while doing so, performing as a sort of in-game M*A*S*H doctor.
And this begins to show us how WoW simulates the real world. Player characters can get hurt or sick, and in-game doctors can heal the ill.
The document seems to concern the property of a widow called Miriam
Israeli authorities say they have recovered a papyrus document which appears to be nearly 2,000 years old.
The document measures 15cm by 15cm (6in by 6in), and contains 15 lines of ancient Hebrew script.
It appears to be a legal instruction, transferring a widow's property to her late husband's brother.
It was seized from two Palestinian men in a sting operation at a Jerusalem hotel, police said. The two could face several years in jail.
Not only does God exist, but he intervenes in our lives - at least according to Francis Collins, the former head of the human genome project.
Collins recruits quantum physics to make his religious case, and has set up a website called Biologos. The site is funded by the Templeton Foundation, which seeks to find common ground between science and religion.
Laudable aim or not, the argument seems an odd one for Collins to make, given that he's such a renowned scientist and led such a pioneering project, one grounded so deeply in the principles of scientific enquiry and discipline.
Odd, because it undermines the case that science alone can explain how and when the world came to be. Collins sort of agrees, in his book The Language of God, but says that the Bible explains the "why" we came to exist. Fair enough. But he goes a stage further - and for me strays into the realms of mumbo-jumbo.
© ESO
Orange stars live longer than the sun and are less violent than red dwarf stars, making the planets around them good candidates for hosting life
The universe's best real estate for life may be around stars a little less massive than the sun, called orange dwarfs, according to a new analysis. These stars live much longer than sun-like stars, and have safer habitable zones - where liquid water can exist - than those of lighter red dwarf stars.
Stars similar in mass to the sun, categorised as a yellow dwarf, have received the most attention from planet hunters. But recent research suggests orange dwarfs may provide an even better hunting ground for life-bearing planets.
Edward Guinan of Villanova University in Pennsylvania, leads a team that has been studying how the properties of stars vary with mass. The team is using observations from a variety of sources, such as archival measurements from the ROSAT X-ray satellite, and more recent measurements from ground-based telescopes.
When you're on a diet, deciding to skip your favorite calorie-laden foods and eat something healthier takes a whole lot of self-control--an ability that seems to come easier to some of us than others. Now, scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have uncovered differences in the brains of people who are able to exercise self-control versus those who find it almost impossible.
This image is beautiful for many reasons. It was captured by the MVIC imaging spectrometer, part of the Ralph instrument, on New Horizons, as it left the Jupiter system on March 2, 2007.
© NASA
Jupiter's moons Io and Europa.
Tvashtar, a Vulcano on Io, is erupting a plume, shining blue near its north pole. Lava can be seen glowing.
What you are looking at is two moons of Jupiter, Io and Europa, both in crescent phase, as New Horizons has passed by Jupiter and now must look back toward the inner solar system and the Sun to see it. Europa appears to be the larger of the two, but that's an optical illusion because of their different distances from the spacecraft: larger Io (3,630 kilometers in diameter) is 4.6 million kilometers from New Horizons, while smaller Europa (3,122 kilometers in diameter) is closer at 3.8 million kilometers away.
Flu vaccine studies that are funded by industry are significantly more likely to be published in prestigious journals and to later be cited in the scientific literature than studies without such funding, according to a survey of 274 studies conducted by researchers from the Cochrane Vaccine Field in Italy, and published in the British Medical Journal.
