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Astronomers Discover Youngest And Lowest Mass Dwarfs


Space Daily
Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:41 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Hidden and mysterious. Great swaths of dust disguise this direction in our galaxy. This great molecular cloud harbours the formation of new solar systems. However, facination with the field lies not with what is seen, but instead by the intimated hints of activity. Subtle glows of pink and blue do little to cast warmth on a field that shows the structure of the cold interstellar medium. To the left the cluster and surrounding bluish reflection nebula of IC348 punctuate the darkness. To the right the strange and ornate concentration of NGC 1333 looks as a miniature peacock amid dark and foreboding clouds.
Astronomers have found three brown dwarfs with estimated masses of less than 10 times that of Jupiter, making them among the youngest and lowest mass sub-stellar objects detected in the solar neighborhood to date.

The observations were made by a team of astronomers working at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de l'Observatoire de Grenoble (LAOG), France, using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). Andrew Burgess will be presenting the discovery at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, on Wednesday 22nd April.

The dwarfs were found in a star forming region named IC 348, which lies almost 1000 light years from the Solar System towards the constellation of Perseus. This cluster is approximately 3 million years old - extremely young compared to our 4.5 billion year old Sun - which makes it a good location in order to search for the lowest mass brown dwarfs.
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Telescope

Hubble Survey Reveals The Formation Of The First Massive Galaxies


Space Daily
Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:31 UTC
Image
© C Conselice, A Bluck, GOODS NICMOS Team
NICMOS image of merging galaxies.
First results from the GOODS NICMOS survey, the largest Hubble Space Telescope program ever led from outside of the United States, reveal how the most massive galaxies in the early Universe assembled to form the most massive objects in the Universe today. Dr. Chris Conselice from the University of Nottingham will present the results at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science at the University of Hertfordshire on Wednesday 22nd April.

The observations are part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), a campaign that is using NASA's Spitzer, Hubble and Chandra space telescopes together with ESA's XMM Newton X-ray observatory to study the most distant Universe.
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Telescope

Chandra Shows Shocking Impact Of Galaxy Jet


Space Daily
Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:28 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The image shows in red the X-ray emission produced by high-energy particles accelerated at the shock front where Centaurus A's expanding radio lobe (shown in blue) collides with the surrounding galaxy. In the top-left corner X-ray emission from close to the central black hole, and from the X-ray jet extending in the opposite direction can also be seen. Centaurus A (NGC 5128) is the nearest active galaxy to Earth. It is located about 14 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. Its structure suggests that it is an example of an elliptical galaxy that has been disrupted by a collision with a smaller spiral galaxy.
A survey by the Chandra X-ray observatory has revealed in detail, for the first time, the effects of a shock wave blasted through a galaxy by powerful jets of plasma emanating from a supermassive black hole at the galactic core.

The observations of Centaurus A, the nearest galaxy that contains these jets, have enabled astronomers to revise dramatically their picture of how jets affect the galaxies in which they live. The results will be presented on Wednesday 22nd April at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Hatfield by Dr. Judith Croston of the University of Hertfordshire.

A team led by Dr. Croston and Dr. Ralph Kraft, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the USA, used very deep X-ray observations from Chandra to get a new view of the jets in Centaurus A. The jets inflate large bubbles filled with energetic particles, driving a shock wave through the stars and gas of the surrounding galaxy.
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Telescope

Hubble Celebrates 19th Anniversary With Fountain Of Youth


Space Daily - SPX
Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:24 UTC
Image
© NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
This picture was issued to celebrate the 19th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1990. Hubble has made more than 880 000 observations and snapped over 570 000 images of 29 000 celestial objects over the past 19 years.
To commemorate the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's 19 years of success, the orbiting telescope has photographed a peculiar system of galaxies known as Arp 194. This interacting group contains several galaxies along with a "cosmic fountain" of stars, gas, and dust that stretches over 100,000 light years.

Over the past 19 years Hubble has taken dozens of exotic pictures of galaxies going "bump in the night" as they collide with each other and have a variety of close encounters of the galactic kind.

Just when you thought these interactions couldn't look any stranger, this image of a trio of galaxies, called Arp 194, looks as if one of the galaxies has sprung a leak.
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Network

Cable Giants Continue Hoping No One Will Notice Their Attempts to Destroy the Internet

Tana Ganeva
Alternet
Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:58 UTC
Last week, a full-on customer revolt forced Time Warner to cease their metered billing program - a system in which Internet users sign up for differently priced broadband plans and pay extra if they exceed their bandwidth limits. The plan was an infuriating inconvenience (i.e. rip-off) premised on the ethical business concept that you can arbitrarily jack up prices on a product if a heavily-monopolized marketplace leaves customers with little in the way of consumer choice.

Seems like a sweet idea. Except that Time Warner customers, media reform groups and tech bloggers inundated both government Representatives and the company with complaints. Soon, members of Congress were winning easy points by vocally criticizing Time Warner. On April 15th, CEO Glenn Britt announced that the company was dropping metered billing.
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Robot

Unloved and Overpriced, Consumer Robots Battle for Survival

Priya Ganapati
wired.com
Wed, 22 Apr 2009 06:07 UTC
The green, scaly Pleo -- a robotic dinosaur -- has taken its last breath as its maker Ugobe filed for bankruptcy Monday. But the Pleo's death is just the beginning of a tough battle for the fledgling U.S. consumer robotics industry's survival.

Pleo joins at least three other consumer robots that have been shelved this year. Robot makers have been hit by a double whammy: A recession-inflicted downturn in consumer spending and a lack of mainstream acceptance of robots by American consumers. Those factors combined put the industry in a zone of pain.
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Robot

Help: My Teacher Is a Robot. Really

Zach Miners
U.S. News and World Report
Tue, 21 Apr 2009 06:03 UTC
Smiling. Scolding. Calling roll. If these are the primary job responsibilities for teaching a class of Japanese preteen students, then Hiroshi Kobayashi, Tokyo University of Science professor and creator of the robot named Saya, might really be on to something.

Saya, a female-looking robot complete with shoulder-length black hair, large eyes, thin eyelashes, and a youthful face, was originally designed to be used as a receptionist, as Japanese companies search for a solution to a growing labor shortage as the nation's population ages. But news reports came out last month when Saya was tested in a Tokyo classroom of fifth and sixth graders as a substitute teacher. It (she?) drew laughter from the students with its mechanical mannerisms and declarations of basic pre-programmed phrases such as "Thank you!" It is being called the world's "first robot teacher."
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People

Study finds file-sharers buy ten times more music

Terrence Russell
VentureBeat
Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:40 UTC
A new report from BI Norwegian School of Management shows illegal file-sharers are more likely to purchase music from legitimate sources than other web users.

I know, I know. The whole thing sounds questionable, but here's how it comes together: Ars Technica reports that researchers monitored the music download habits of 1,900 web users age 15 and above. Over time, the study found that users who downloaded music illegally from P2P file-sharing sites like BitTorrent ultimately made ten times as many legit music purchases than the law abiding users. The study also found that online music stores like iTunes and Amazon MP3 were preferred for the pirates' paid music purchases over traditional brick-and-mortar record stores.
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Telescope

Scientists discover a nearly Earth-sized planet

Jennifer Quinn
Associated Press
Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:42 UTC
Image
© European Organisation for Astronomical Research
An artist's impression of 'Planet e' , forground left, released by the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere Tuesday April 21, 2009.
Hatfield, England - In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in Tuesday on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size. The other is in the right place. European researchers said they not only found the smallest exoplanet ever, called Gliese 581 e, but realized that a neighboring planet discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d, was in the prime habitable zone for potential life.

"The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone,'" said Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist at Geneva University in Switzerland.

An American expert called the discovery of the tiny planet "extraordinary."
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Eye 2

Parasite Breaks Its Own DNA To Avoid Detection


Science Daily
Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:47 UTC
The parasite Trypanosoma brucei, which causes African sleeping sickness, is like a thief donning a disguise. Every time the host's immune cells get close to destroying the parasite, it escapes detection by rearranging its DNA and changing its appearance. Now two laboratories at Rockefeller University have joined forces to reveal how the parasite initiates its getaway, by cleaving both strands of its DNA.

The parasite's survival strategy hinges upon its ability to change its surface coat. The genes that encode the current coat, which is comprised entirely of molecules called variant surface glycoproteins (VSG), are located in 15 to 20 regions near the ends of chromosomes. When the host's immune system has just about killed all of the parasites, some surviving parasites rearrange their DNA and switch their coat, initiating another wave of infection. During this cat-and-mouse game, the immune system never gains the upper hand and the victim dies.
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