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Perseids Meteor Shower Lights Up Night Sky


The Telegraph
Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:47 UTC
Image
© Reuters
The Perseid meteor shower is sparked every August when the Earth passes through a stream of space debris left by comet Swift-Tuttle
Star-gazers witnessed the climax of one of the year's most spectacular meteor showers last night as a new moon and cloud-free night in some areas produced perfect conditions for seeing the Perseids.

The display of shooting stars is created by debris from the Swift-Tuttle comet burning up in the Earth's atmosphere.

While most of the meteors are no bigger than a grain of sand, they create tremendous amounts of heat when they hit the atmosphere at 135,000 miles per hour (216,000 kph).

The northern hemisphere offers the best views of the annual event, because of the tilt in the Earth's axis. Some of the meteors - named after the Perseus constellation which provides their backdrop - are so bright they can outshine the light-pollution in big cities, although country-dwellers always get the best views.
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Blackbox

Google, Boffins Crack Rubik's Cube Mystery

Jane Fae Ozimek
The Register
Thu, 12 Aug 2010 03:25 UTC
The ultimate answer - or is it?

Has Google finally cracked it? Revealed today, courtesy of the massed ranks of Google computing, the answer to the ultimate question - not the old one about Life the Universe and Everything - is 20!

We're talking God's Number here, or more prosaically the maximum number of moves required to solve the Rubik's Cube no matter what the start position. This result, if no one comes up with a position that demands 21 moves or more, is the end of a 30 year quest that began in July 1981 with a claim by mathematician Morwen B Thistlethwaite that 52 was the answer.
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Igloo

'Climategate' university to open up data


Kable
Wed, 11 Aug 2010 04:30 UTC
The University of East Anglia is to receive JISC funding for a project to open up its research on global warming to scrutiny and re-use.

The university, which was at the centre of a scandal revealed by leaked emails from its Climatic Research Unit, will examine how best to expose climate data for re-use, make it easier for researchers to find the data and to understand its validity.
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Sun

One month ago today on Easter Island


Space Weather
Wed, 11 Aug 2010 21:54 UTC
Image
© Billy Mallery
On July 11, 2010, the Moon passed directly in front of the sun, producing a total eclipse over the South Pacific. "It was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen," says Billy Mallery who witnessed the event from Easter Island.

"I spent much time trying to find just the right place on the island for totality, and this was it... with the Moai 'looking' straight at the sun's corona," says Mallery.

Easter island was one of the few places the Moon's shadow made landfall. Mostly, the path of totality sprawled across open, uninhabited ocean. That didn't stop the eclipse-chasers, though, who crowded upon every boat, cruise ship, and atoll they could find to watch the show.
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Info

Fresh Scar on the Moon's Surface

Nicole Gugliucci
Discovery News
Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:43 UTC
Fresh Moon Crater
© NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

With all the hoopla about the Moon having or not having water, let's not forget our satellite's best-known features: its craters.

Although typically a sign of an ancient, unchanged landscape, a new crater on the Moon reminds us that we still live in an intergalactic shooting gallery.

The new crater was announced last week by the Lunar Science Institute at NASA Ames. The impact occurred sometime between an image of the region taken by the Apollo program in 1971 and an image recently taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

The LRO is a spacecraft that is taking large amounts of data on the Moon's terrain and mineralogy, as well as taking those neat pictures of the Apollo landers and astronaut footsteps.

The crater itself is ten meters across, suggesting to me that the impactor was roughly a meter in size. Chunks of rock that size might hit the Earth several times a year, causing a stir in the local media or falling harmlessly and unnoticed. On the Moon however, it makes a bright crater, spewing forth lighter colored rock over the dark basalt surface.
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Info

New Desert Crater Found Using Google Maps and Free Software


Technology Review, MIT
Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:40 UTC
The discovery of a new crater in the Bayuda Desert in Sudan suggests that the next generation of crater hunters could be amateurs based at home.

Sudan Crater
© Technology Review, MIT
Crater in the Bayuda Desert, Sudan.
Most of the rocky planets, moons and asteroids in the Solar System are pock-marked with impact craters of all sizes. On Earth, however, small craters are rare because they quickly get eroded by weather and water.

So the discovery of new small craters is a reason to celebrate. A couple of weeks ago, an Italian team announced in the journal Science that it had used Google Earth to identify an impact crater in the remote desert of southern Egypt. A quick trip to the region showed this crater to be 45 meters in diameter and reasonably well-preserved in the desert rocks.

Now, just a few days later, Amelia Sparavigna at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy has found evidence of another crater in the Bayuda Desert in Sudan using Google Maps. This one is a little bigger: about 10 kilometres in diameter.

What's interesting about this discovery is the technology used to make it. Sparavigna used Google Maps, an astronomical image-processing program called AstroFracTool which she and a colleague developed, and an open source image-processing package called GIMP.

All of this stuff is available for free on the web, making this kind of discovery open to all. That means the next generation of crater hunters could just as easily be amateurs working from home as professional geologists working on location.
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Info

Scientists question accepted wisdom on what killed Pompeiians when Mt. Vesuvius erupted

Angelica Marin
GlobalPost
Wed, 11 Aug 2010 09:45 UTC
Scientists question accepted wisdom on what killed Pompeiians when Mt. Vesuvius erupted.

A child lies on the ground with his tiny arms elevated in motion. Beside him, a woman with another child on her lap clenches her fists, as if guarding herself from an inevitable horror. Inside a dimly lit room, surrounded by chipping coral frescoes, lie 2,000-year-old skeletal remnants, vividly human forms encased in chalky plaster.
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Magnify

Stone Age remains are Britain's earliest house


The University of Manchester
Wed, 11 Aug 2010 09:36 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Archaeologists working on Stone Age remains at a site in North Yorkshire say it contains Britain's earliest surviving house.

The team from the Universities of Manchester and York reveal today that the home dates to at least 8,500 BC - when Britain was part of continental Europe.

The research has been made possible by a grant from the Natural Environment Research Council, early excavation funding from the British Academy, and from English Heritage who are about to schedule the site as a National Monument . The Vale of Pickering Research Trust has also provided support for the excavation works.

The research team unearthed the 3.5 metres circular structure next to an ancient lake at Star Carr, near Scarborough, a site comparable in archaeological importance to Stonehenge.
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Robot

Calgary scientists to create human 'neurochip'

Carolyn Abraham
The Globe and Mail
Mon, 09 Aug 2010 01:45 UTC
Dr. Naweed Syed neural chip
© Larry MacDougal for The Globe and Mail
Dr. Naweed Syed in the lab at the University of Calgary's Health Sciences Centre.with an extreme close-up of the neurochip displayed on a computer screen.
The science fiction of melding man and machine has played out for decades onscreen, from The Six Million Dollar Man to The Terminator.

But the bionic hybrid age may well be flickering to life - real life - in the Calgary lab where scientists who made history fusing snail brain cells to a computer microchip six years ago are poised to try the same feat with human cells.

Researchers at the University of Calgary's Hotchkiss Brain Institute are to announce Tuesday that they have made a key advance in connecting brain cells to a newly designed silicon chip, crafted with the National Research Council of Canada, that allows them to "hear" the conversation between living tissue and an electronic device as never before.
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Pharoah

Robot to explore mysterious tunnels in Great Pyramid

Andrew Johnson
The Independent
Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:37 UTC
Image
© afp/getty images
The Pyramid of Khufu is the only wonder of the ancient world still standing.
For 4,500 years, the Great Pyramid at Giza has enthralled, fascinated and ultimately frustrated everyone who has attempted to penetrate its secrets.

Now a roboticsteam from Leeds University, working with Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, is preparing a machine which they hope will solve one of its enduring mysteries.
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