Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

The 2008 Perseid Meteor Shower


Physorg.com
Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:49 UTC


Perseid meteor shower
©Unknown

"The time to look is during the dark hours before dawn on Tuesday, August 12th," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "There should be plenty of meteors--perhaps one or two every minute."

The source of the shower is Comet Swift-Tuttle. Although the comet is far away, currently located beyond the orbit of Uranus, a trail of debris from the comet stretches all the way back to Earth. Crossing the trail in August, Earth will be pelted by specks of comet dust hitting the atmosphere at 132,000 mph. At that speed, even a flimsy speck of dust makes a vivid streak of light when it disintegrates--a meteor! Because, Swift-Tuttle's meteors streak out of the constellation Perseus, they are called "Perseids."
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Info

New Evidence Of Battle Between Humans And Ancient Virus


Science Daily
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:21 UTC
For millennia, humans and viruses have been locked in an evolutionary back-and-forth -- one changes to outsmart the other, prompting the second to change and outsmart the first. With retroviruses, which work by inserting themselves into their host's DNA, the evidence remains in our genes.

Last year, researchers at Rockefeller University and the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center brought an ancient retrovirus back to life and showed it could reproduce and infect human cells. Now, the same scientists have looked at the human side of the story and found evidence that our ancestors fought back against that virus with a defense mechanism our bodies still use today.

"This is the first time that we've been able to take an ancient retrovirus and analyze how it interacts with host defense mechanisms in the laboratory in the present day," says Paul Bieniasz, who is an associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Retrovirology at Rockefeller and a scientist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. Bieniasz and graduate student Youngnam Lee took their resurrected virus, called HERV-K, tested its strength against molecules involved in human antiviral defense.
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Info

Remains of vast Neolithic site found in south China


Reuters
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:03 UTC
Beijing - Thousands of ancient artifacts and wooden poles more than 3,000 years old have been unearthed in China's southern Yunnan province, possibly the world's largest site of a Neolithic community, local media reported on Tuesday.

The poles, found standing 4.6 meters underground, were used as part of building structures for an ancient community that may have covered an area of 4 square km, the China Daily reported, citing Min Rui, a researcher at Yunnan Archaeological Institute, who is leading the excavation team.

The site could be older than the Hemudu community in Yuyao, in Zhejiang province, which is among the most famous in China and is believed to be the birthplace of society around the Yangtze River.

An area of 1,350 sq m has already been uncovered and excavation is ongoing.

"I was shocked when I first saw the site. I have never seen such a big and orderly one," Yan Wenming, history professor at Peking University, was quoted as saying.
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Better Earth

Unique Fossil Discovery Shows Antarctic Was Once Much Warmer


Science Daily
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:56 UTC
A new fossil discovery- the first of its kind from the whole of the Antarctic continent- provides scientists with new evidence to support the theory that the polar region was once much warmer.

Scientists made a new fossil discovery in the Dry Valleys of the East Antarctic region. The fossils (ostracods) come from an ancient lake - 14 million years old - and are exceptionally well preserved, with all of their soft anatomy in 3-dimensions.

Image
©Mark Williams, University of Leicester
Figure of the fossil ostracod from the Dry Valleys. The specimen is less than 1 mm long, but preserves an array of soft tissues including legs and mouth parts. The head end is to the right.

The discovery by an international team of scientists is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It involved researchers from the University of Leicester, North Dakota State University, the British Geological Survey, Queen Mary University of London, and Boston University.
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Better Earth

Sea Surface Maps Help Extreme Weather Forecasting


RedOrbit
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:15 UTC


Image
©NASA/JPL
Satellites passed over the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004. Two of those satellites--Jason 1 and Topex/Poseidon--were equipped with altimeters that for the first time measured the height of a tsunami in the open ocean.

For humans in the path of destructive hurricanes and tsunamis, an accurate warning of the pending event is critical for damage control and survival. Such warnings, however, require a solid base of scientific observations, and a new satellite is ready for the job.

The Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason 2 adds to the number of eyes in the sky measuring sea surface and wave heights across Earth's oceans. The increased coverage will help researchers improve current models for practical use in predicting hurricane intensity, while providing valuable data that can be used to improve tsunami warning models.
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Sherlock

Scholar Finds New Archaeological Sites by Googling

Dani Cooper
ABC Science Online
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:37 UTC
Indiana Jones's next adventure may well be in front of a computer if Hollywood scriptwriters decide to embrace a new approach to archaeological research in war-torn zones.

David Thomas, a Ph.D. student in La Trobe University's archaeological program in Melbourne, has used Google Earth to safely uncover historic sites in a remote part of war-torn Afghanistan.

Using the free Internet resource, Thomas found up to 450 possible archaeological sites in Registan, which borders Helmand and Kandahar provinces in southern Afghanistan. The decision to use Google Earth was "partly born out of adversity", Thomas said, when a planned field trip was cancelled because of security concerns.

The region has been made inaccessible because of the ongoing military conflict between western and Afghan government forces and the former Taliban government.

Image
©Google Earth
Using the free Internet resource, Google Earth, a scholar found up to 450 possible archaeological sites in Registan, which borders Helmand and Kandahar provinces in southern Afghanistan. Shwn is the citadel of Bust. Bust was the tenth to twelfth century Ghaznavid dynasty's winter capital that stretches along the Helmand River.
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Stop

American physicists warned not to debate global warming

Andrew Orlowski
The Register
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:28 UTC
Bureaucrats at the American Physical Society (APS) have issued a curious warning to their members about an article in one of their own publications. Don't read this, they say - we don't agree with it. But what is it about the piece that is so terrible, that like Medusa, it could make men go blind?
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Evil Rays

Coral isotopes show quake history; Absorbed carbon may also improve disaster forecasts

Eric Hand
Nature
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:58 UTC
Carbon isotopes trapped for thousands of years in coral skeletons could establish the long-term frequency of major earthquakes in southeast Asia and the South Pacific, and perhaps enable these events to be forecast.

Geoscientists have used corals before to look at earthquake history, by studying the terraced growth patterns that result. A major quake can push up an entire region, thrusting parts of a reef above the low-tide level, killing the exposed coral polyps. The rest of the coral continues to grow, producing a 'hat-brim' pattern that can indicate elevation changes as small as a few centimetres. This phenomenon has allowed scientists to date many earthquakes, including major ones in 1797 and 1833 off Sumatra, Indonesia. But the pattern erodes over time, so it can only be used to identify quakes that occurred within the past few hundred years.

Image
©Soc./EPA/Corbis
Wildlife Conservation
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Display

Codex Sinaiticus, the world's oldest Bible, goes online

Harry de Quetteville
Telegraph
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:10 UTC
Almost 1700 years after scribes in the Holy Land first created it from vellum, one of the world's oldest Bibles this week makes its debut on the internet.

codex
©EPA
Prof. Schneider [left] and Dr. Carsten Dorgerloh, of Microsoft, hold two facsimiles of the papyrus Ebers (circa 1550) and a paper of the Codex Sinaiticus (313) at the library of the University of Leipzig
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Roses

Saharan dust storms help sustain life in North Atlantic Ocean


The Hindu
Sun, 20 Jul 2008 05:15 UTC
Working aboard research vessels in the Atlantic, scientists mapped the distribution of nutrients including phosphorous and nitrogen and investigated how organisms such as phytoplankton are sustained in areas with low nutrient levels.

They found that plants are able to grow in these regions because they are able to take advantage of iron minerals in Saharan dust storms. This allows them to use organic or 'recycled' material from dead or decaying plants when nutrients such as phosphorous - an essential component of DNA - in the ocean are low.

Professor George Wolff, from the University's Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, explains: "We found that cyanobacteria - a type of ancient phytoplankton - are significant to the understanding of how ocean deserts can support plant growth. Cyanobacteria need nitrogen, phosphorous and iron in order to grow. They get nitrogen from the atmosphere, but phosphorous is a highly reactive chemical that is scarce in sea water and is not found in the Earth's atmosphere. Iron is present only in tiny amounts in sea water, even though it is one of the most abundant elements on earth.
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