Helen Briggs
BBCMon, 24 Mar 2008 17:36 UTC
Saturn's moon Titan may have a deep, hidden ocean, according to data published in the journal Science.
Radar images from the Cassini-Huygens mission reinforce predictions that a reservoir of liquid water exists beneath the thick crust of ice.
If confirmed, it would mean that Titan has two of the key components for life - water and organic molecules.
Currently, three other Solar System objects are suspected of having deep oceans: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of the US space agency (Nasa), the European Space Agency (Esa) and the Italian Space Agency (Asi).
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| ©NASA
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| Future observations by Cassini will help test the prediction
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In the spring of 2005, diving was conducted in MacDonald Lake as part of a unique submarine project at the Haliburton Forest and Wild Life Reserve. Repeatedly staff of Haliburton Forest would stumble upon an unusual stone structure, perched on top of a rock ledge at a depth of 40 feet below the present lake level. Initially the structure was considered a complex version of a 'perched erratic', those monstrous rocks, ferried by the glaciers thousands of years ago and dumped where they happened to melt at the end of one of the recent cold-freezes.
When several geologists and archaeologists saw images of this object - a 1,000 pound, elongated and south pointing rock sitting on baseball-sized stones at each end, which in turn, were resting on a massive, several thousand pound slab on top of the ledge, they expressed doubts about its natural origin. Haliburton Forest engaged the services of an underwater archaeologist to examine the structure. Before diving, he explained that so far he had never encountered man-made rock-cairns, which were stabilised without the help of shim-stones. If he found these, it would convince him of the structure's man-made, not natural, origin.
Anna Salleh
ABCThu, 20 Mar 2008 17:19 UTC
Scientific theories and experiments have failed to convince a physicist what's behind the mysterious natural phenomenon of ball lightning.
Emeritus Professor Bob Crompton of the Australian National University gave a presentation in Canberra this week on the latest scientific investigations into ball lightning, something once considered as likely as UFOs.
"I don't believe there is any satisfactory explanation so far," says Crompton for these small bright lights that appear after a lightning strike.
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| ©Unknown
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| Ball Lightning
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A ground state atomic nucleus can be something of a black box, masking subtle details about its structure behind the aggregate interplay of its protons and neutrons. This is one reason nuclear scientists are so keenly interested in isomers -- relatively long-lived excited-state nuclei that more easily give up their structural secrets to experimentalists.
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| ©Georg Bollen, NSCL
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| NSCL's LEBIT ion trap: shown (for scale next to a bottle cap) are the gold-plated high-precision electrodes that provide the electric fields needed for capturing and storing rare isotopes ions in LEBIT's Penning trap mass spectrometer.
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Flies may be more than a mere nuisance. They may also spread food poisoning bacteria like Salmonella enteritidis to chickens and their eggs.
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| ©Stephen Ausmus
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| House flies can have a role in spreading Salmonellato poultry.
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Agricultural Research Service (ARS) microbiologist Peter S. Holt and entomologist Christopher J. Geden found that the common housefly, Musca domestica, readily picks up bacteria from its surroundings. When the chickens eat the flies, the bacteria get inside the birds. Holt works in the Egg Safety and Quality Research Unit at the ARS Richard B. Russell Research Center in Athens, Ga., while Geden is at the ARS Center for Medical, Agricultural and Veterinary Entomology in Gainesville, Fla.
Researchers have developed a computer algorithm that can imitate the bat's ability to classify plants using echolocation. The study represents a collaboration between machine learning scientists and biologists studying bat orientation.
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| ©iStockphoto/Gijs Bekenkamp
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| Fruit bat in flight. To detect plants, bats emit ultrasonic pulses and decipher the various echoes that return.
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Hydrogen could be a clean, abundant energy source, but it's difficult to store in bulk. In new research, materials scientists at Rice University have made the surprising discovery that tiny carbon capsules called buckyballs are so strong they can hold volumes of hydrogen nearly as dense as those at the center of Jupiter.
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| ©iStockphoto/Martin McCarthy
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| A model of a molecule of buckminsterfullerene -- C60.
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"Based on our calculations, it appears that some buckyballs are capable of holding volumes of hydrogen so dense as to be almost metallic," said lead researcher Boris Yakobson, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Rice. "It appears they can hold about 8 percent of their weight in hydrogen at room temperature, which is considerably better than the federal target of 6 percent."
Antti Arjava
CCNetSun, 24 Dec 2006 10:33 UTC
In 1983 Richard Stothers and Michael Rampino of NASA published a list of all ancient volcanic eruptions known from Mediterranean historical sources. Their list included a persistent dust veil or dry fog which darkened the sky for about a year in AD 536--37, bringing about cold, drought and food shortage in the Mediterranean area or, as it has since been claimed, all over the northern hemisphere. Especially following two popular books devoted to the dust veil by David Keys and Mike Baillie, it has been acclaimed as the worst climatic disaster in recorded history. In the most wide-ranging scenarios, the year 536 is seen as a watershed moment between the ancient and modern worlds, bringing about economic decline, population movements, political unrest, and ultimately the collapse of civilizations.
Every week, the Opinion section presents an essay from The Times's archive by a columnist or contributor that we hope sheds light on current news or provides a window on the past.
This week's offering comes from Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction novelist, who died on Wednesday. In 1994, he urged Op-Ed readers to look to the skies--or risk going the way of the dinosaurs.
