Science & TechnologyS


Pharoah

Scientists Discover 'Blue' Mystery of Ancient Egypt

Helena Zhu
Epoch Times
Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:13 UTC
Egyptian Pottery
© Colin A. Hope/Monash UniversityPottery decorated in a distinctive pale blue color was in vogue in New Kingdom Egypt, particularly during the reign of Amenhotep III and Ramesses II.
While most Egyptian pottery was undecorated, during the New Kingdom - Egypt's Golden Age - a variety of pottery was elegantly decorated in a distinctive pale blue.

The pottery has been found at many sites in Egypt, the Middle East, and Sudan, with most of it being in Egypt. Given the restricted use of the blue paint, it probably was available only to artisans associated with major royal residences.

To obtain an uncontaminated sample of the blue paint for chemical analysis, Dr. Jennifer Smith, who is an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL), Dr. Colin Hope, associate professor and director of the Center for Archaeology and Ancient History at Monash University in Australia, and Paul Kucera, a doctoral student at Monash University, belly-crawled through a long, narrow tunnel at a desert oasis. The tunnel was carved in the rock by Egyptians at the time of the pharaohs.

Although some Egyptian sculptures were colored by adding ground copper to ground quartz, the pale blue pottery was thought to be decorated by cobalt.
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Camera

Shuttle Cloud


Space Weather
Sat, 10 Apr 2010 21:51 UTC
Image
© Howard CohenPhoto details: Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 190 seconds, ISO 800
On April 5th, space shuttle Discovery blasted off from Cape Canaveral at the crack of dawn. The shuttle began its journey in darkness--the sun was still below the horizon--but moments after it left the pad, Discovery burst into high altitude sunlight and proceeded to put on an extraordinary show. University of Florida astronomy professor Howard Cohen describes what he saw from his home in Gainesville, more than 130 miles from the Cape.

"The launch began in typical fashion- a brilliant, yellowish glow rising out of the southwest gradually morphing into a white contrail. Impatient observes might have thought that was it. But then an amazing contrail, the likes of which I have never seen before, rapidly appeared around and following the shuttle's path. For a short time it resembled a comet streaking across the dawn sky." He took this picture using his Canon EOS 5D.

Comment: For more information, see SOTT's Best of the Web Article: Cosmic Climate Change: Space Shuttle Discovery - STS 131 leaves spectacular dragon trails in the sky

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Sun

Today The Sun Had A Comet For Breakfast


Space Weather
Sat, 10 Apr 2010 21:47 UTC
Image
© SOHO
The icy visitor from the outer solar system appeared with no warning on April 9th and plunged into the sun during the early hours of April 10th. One comet went in, none came out. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) had a good view of the encounter.

The comet was probably a member of the Kreutz sungrazer family. Named after a 19th century German astronomer who studied them in detail, Kreutz sungrazers are fragments from the breakup of a giant comet at least 2000 years ago. Several of these fragments pass by the sun and disintegrate every day. Most are too small to see but occasionally a big fragment like today's attracts attention.
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Satellite

Spacecraft Spots Active Volcanoes on Venus

Dennis Overbye
The New York Times
Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:35 UTC
Image
© NASASurface heat data from the Venus Express spacecraft show volcanic activity on Venus
Venus is alive.

Researchers using data from the European Space Agency's Venus Express spacecraft said they spotted three active volcanoes that recently poured red hot lava onto the planet's already broiling surface.

The discovery, announced in a paper published Friday online in Science, suggests that Venus - like the Earth - is periodically resurfaced by lava flows, explaining why it seems devoid of craters.

"We estimate the flows to be younger than 2.5 million years, and probably much younger, likely 250,000 years or less, indicating that Venus is actively resurfacing," the authors write. They were led by Suzanne E. Smrekar of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
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Satellite

Ice-Tracking Satellite Launched by European Agency

Alex Morales
Bloomberg
Thu, 08 Apr 2010 21:31 UTC
The European Space Agency launched its CryoSat-2 satellite on a 140 million-euro ($190 million) mission to measure the thickness of ice on Greenland, Antarctica and the polar seas.

The launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was aired live on ESA's Web site. It comes four years after the original satellite was lost due to a failure of the launcher. About 17 minutes after liftoff, the agency confirmed the first signal from the CryoSat-2 was received in Malindi, Kenya.

"This time the launcher worked beautifully: We are in orbit," ESA Director-General Jean-Jacques Dordain said. "It's one additional contribution from ESA to better understand the planet Earth and climate change."

United Nations scientists have highlighted melting ice as a harbinger of climate change, and in 2007 said oceans will likely rise by as much as 59 centimeters (23 inches) by 2100 as a result of global warming. The loss of sea ice can increase the rate of warming by leaving dark, heat-absorbing ocean exposed.
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Vader

Trophy system seeks to destroy missiles and grenades before impact

Shane McGlaun
Dailytech
Thu, 08 Apr 2010 11:01 UTC
Image
The governments of most nations around the globe spend untold sums of money developing weapons that strike at enemies with heavy force, or on a smaller scale through the use of unmanned drones. Many of these nations also spend great sums of money on defensive technologies to protect their troops from enemy weapons.

In August of 2009, Israel Defense Forces announced a new system for defense of tanks that is called the Trophy Active protection system. The system was operational at the time and undergoing extensive testing. The idea behind the Trophy system is to protect tanks from threats including missiles and rocket propelled grenades fired by enemy combatants.
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Blackbox

Discovery that quasars don't show time dilation mystifies astronomers

Lisa Zyga
PhysOrg
Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:53 UTC
Image
© NASAThis X-ray image shows the quasar PKS 1127-145, a highly luminous source of X-rays and visible light located about 10 billion light years from Earth. Its X-ray jet extends at least a million light years from the quasar.
The phenomenon of time dilation is a strange yet experimentally confirmed effect of relativity theory. One of its implications is that events occurring in distant parts of the universe should appear to occur more slowly than events located closer to us. For example, when observing supernovae, scientists have found that distant explosions seem to fade more slowly than the quickly-fading nearby supernovae.

The effect can be explained because (1) the speed of light is a constant (independent of how fast a light source is moving toward or away from an observer) and (2) the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, which causes light from distant objects to redshift (i.e. the wavelengths to become longer) in relation to how far away the objects are from observers on Earth. In other words, as space expands, the interval between light pulses also lengthens. Since expansion occurs throughout the universe, it seems that time dilation should be a property of the universe that holds true everywhere, regardless of the specific object or event being observed. However, a new study has found that this doesn't seem to be the case - quasars, it seems, give off light pulses at the same rate no matter their distance from the Earth, without a hint of time dilation.
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Telescope

New Moon Rock is Fit for a King

Elizabeth Zubritsky
PhysOrg
Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:00 UTC
Image
© Wikimedia CommonsSpinel the gem comes in a rainbow of colors, such as these crystals in a white marble/calcite matrix.
People don't discover a new type of moon rock every day, so consider the odds of finding one rich in a mineral that England's King Henry V wore on his battle helmet. And then imagine spotting, right on the Man in the Moon's nose, huge and previously unknown deposits of another mineral from the same family. Using data from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) on India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, a team of researchers recently did just that.

The new rock is a unique mixture of plain-old plagioclase -- plentiful in the Earth's crust and the moon's highlands -- and pink spinel, an especially beautiful arrangement of magnesium, aluminum and oxygen that, in its purest forms, is prized as a gemstone here on Earth. The rock was discovered on the far side of the moon by Carlé Pieters, a planetary scientist at Brown University, Providence, R.I. and the principal investigator for the M3 science team. Shortly after, massive deposits of a different type of spinel were identified on the near side by other M3 team members, led by Jessica Sunshine at the University of Maryland-College Park.
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Info

New research reconstructs ancient history of Island Southeast Asia


PhysOrg.com
Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:40 UTC
An article in this month's Current Anthropology challenges the controversial idea that Island Southeast Asia was settled 5,000 years ago by a migration of farmers from Taiwan.

The article, by Mark Donohue of the Australian National University and Tim Denham of Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), also questions the broader idea that farming technology and language spread together in many parts of the world as a "cultural package."

Scholars have debated for years about the history of Island Southeast Asia - the present-day countries of the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. The most prominent theory about the region's history is the "out of Taiwan" model. According to the model, people from Taiwan migrated south into the region about 5,000 years ago. Advanced farming technology enabled the migrants to displace indigenous hunter-gatherers, and establish their culture and language as the dominant one in the region. Linguistic evidence seems to support that version of events. All of the languages spoken in the region - called the Austronesian languages - can be traced back to a Taiwanese origin.

Influential scholars, including Guns, Germs and Steel author Jared Diamond, believe that the "out of Taiwan" model is a prime example of how prehistoric farming cultures tended to expand their territories, bringing their language and other cultural traditions with them. Advocates of the model believe similar scenarios explain language patterns in areas of Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.

But Donohue and Denham present a very different history of Island Southeast Asia.
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Info

Ancient Supervolcano Created Giant Underwater Mountain Chain

Charles Q. Choi
Lives Science
Fri, 09 Apr 2010 03:16 UTC
A supervolcano on the ocean floor might have spewed massive amounts of lava in a rapid amount of time, new findings that could help reveal the mysterious origin of some of these ancient goliaths, which may have triggered mass extinctions through Earth's history.

Roughly a dozen supervolcanoes currently exist. Some are on land, while others lie at the bottom of the ocean. Each has produced several million cubic miles of lava - about three hundred times the volume of all the Great Lakes combined - dwarfing the amount of lava produced by the Hawaiian volcanoes or the Icelandic volcano that erupted recently.

These eruptions have dramatically shaped life on Earth, pumping huge amounts of ash, dust and gas into the atmosphere that have killed off species and altered global climate. Despite their global impact, the cause of the massive eruptions from supervolcanoes at times remains unknown.
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