Science & TechnologyS


Satellite

NASA Moon Impactor completes Lunar Maneuver


ScienceDaily.com
Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:30 UTC
Moon as seen from LCROSS satellite
© NASAOne of the first images from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) using the visible light camera during the swingby of the moon. LCROSS has nine science instruments that collect different types of data which are complementary to each other. These instruments provide for a robust collection of data about the composition of the lunar regolith.
The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, successfully completed its most significant early mission milestone Tuesday with a lunar swingby and calibration of its science instruments. The satellite will search for water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon's south pole.

With the assist of the moon's gravity, LCROSS and its attached Centaur booster rocket successfully entered into polar Earth orbit at 6:20 a.m. PDT on June 23. The maneuver puts the spacecraft and Centaur on course for a pair of impacts near the moon's south pole on Oct. 9.
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Hourglass

Stone age water well discovered in Cyprus

Michele Kambas
Reuters
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:50 UTC
Archaeologists in Cyprus have found what they believe are some of the world's oldest water wells, dating from the Stone Age 10,500 years ago and containing the skeleton of a young woman.

The wells, unearthed by an excavator at a building site close to the western coastal town of Paphos, adds to another five previously excavated in the region by a team from the University of Edinburgh.

"Radiocarbon dates indicate that these wells are 9,000 to 10,500 years old, which places them amongst the earliest water wells known in the world," the Antiquities Department said in a statement Tuesday.
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Radar

Time Travel: Fantasy or Science?

John Berman & Wonbo Woo
American Broadcasting Company
Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:02 UTC
Storrs, Connecticut--For some, the idea of time travel is about fantasy. For others it's science. But for Ronald Mallett, it was love -- a son's love for his father.

You might even call it his lifelong mission.

"I thought if I could build a time machine to save my father's life and see him again," said Mallett, whose father died when he was just 10.

"My father was someone who was the center of my life -- I was the oldest of four children and we grew up in the Bronx. And my father was a television repairman," Mallet said.
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Clock

Large Hadron Collider restart pushed back again

Tom Espiner
ZDNet UK
Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:50 UTC
The flagship particle accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) is to be restarted in October as opposed to September.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been offline since an incident on September 19 last year, when an equipment failure caused extensive damage. James Gillies, Cern's head of communications, said on Monday that an internal schedule set in February to restart the experiment has been pushed back by two or three weeks, but that the restart would still commence in the autumn.

"The situation is a retreat from February," Gillies told ZDNet UK. "We had aimed for the end of September, but we're now looking at somewhere in October."
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Blackbox

South Dakota, US: Dark Matter Lab Dedicated 5,000 Feet Underground

Stephen Goldmeier
io9
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:25 UTC
This week, the Sanford Lab dedicated an underground science fortress to research dark matter. The lab is 5,000 feet underground in the mountains of South Dakota, shielded from cosmic radiation.

The lab is on a site that used to do physics research, and was a gold mine before that. The current Sanford Lab, in collaboration with the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL), is the deepest underground lab in the world. It's divided into three levels: the shallow lab, the mid-level, and the deep campus. The deep campus is 6 and a half Empire State Buildings deep, or around 8,000 feet.

DUSEL
© Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation
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Sheeple

Psychology Researchers Finding Patriotic Music May Close Minds, Children's Music May Open Them


Newswise
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:30 UTC
A study of the behaviors elicited from the musical lyrics of common songs is showing that patriotic songs may make participants close-minded and prejudiced while songs like "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" may stimulate a pro-social response.

The words to "Itsy Bitsy Spider" tell a simple story about an arachnid and a spout, but simply recalling the lines could initiate an unintentional attitude.

That's the focus of research by Kansas State University's Eduardo Alvarado, sophomore in pre-law, who is looking at the behaviors elicited from the musical lyrics of common songs.
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Robot

Brain could adapt well to cyborg enhancements

Linda Geddes
New Scientist
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:47 UTC
cyborg implants
© Jeff J Mitchell / GettyThe human brain may be able to include cyborg implants in its representation of the body
When you brush your teeth, the toothbrush may actually become part of your arm - at least as far as your brain is concerned. That's the conclusion of a study showing perceptions of arm length change after people handle a mechanical tool.

The brain maintains a physical map of the body, with different areas in charge of different body parts. Researchers have suggested that when we use tools, our brains incorporate them into this map.

To test the idea, Alessandro Farné of the University of Claude Bernard in Lyon, France, and colleagues attached a mechanical grabber to the arms of 14 volunteers. The modified subjects then used the grabber to pick up out-of-reach objects.
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Telescope

Huge stellar nursery found in dusty corner of our galaxy


New Scientist
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:40 UTC
A vast stellar nursery 14,000 light years away has been hiding behind a thick cloud of dust. It is one of the biggest in our galaxy, and may offer insight into how these objects can grow so big.

The stellar nursery, called CTB 102, is home to perhaps thousands of newborn stars. Measuring 380 light years across, the nursery is a so-called H II region, where the hottest and most massive stars have stripped hydrogen gas of its electrons. The most famous of these regions is the Orion nebula, but CTB 102 is over 10 times its size.

CTB 102 has eluded recognition because it is in the Perseus arm, the spiral arm of the Milky Way next out from ours, where dust blocks visible light. Its size and distance from Earth were unveiled by mapping radio waves emitted from hydrogen gas.
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Calculator

Animals that count - How numeracy evolved

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:32 UTC
Clever Hans's gift was just too good to be true. The Arabian stallion wowed the crowds in early 20th-century Europe with his apparent ability to stomp out the answers to simple mathematical problems, such as 12 - 3 = 9. He could even add fractions and factorise small numbers. Then in 1907, a German psychologist, Oskar Pfungst, proved that Hans was no animal savant.

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Satellite

Russian Zenit Rocket Puts Malaysian Satellite Into Orbit


Space Daily
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:47 UTC
Image
© UnknownMeasat-3a carries 12 Ku-band and 12 C-band active transponders
A Russian Zenit-3SLB carrier rocket launched from the Baikonur space center put Malaysia's Measat-3a communications satellite into orbit on Monday, a Federal Space Agency Roscosmos official said.

"The Russian carrier successfully put the foreign satellite into transfer orbit. Control over the satellite has been transferred to the client, who is responsible for putting the apparatus into geostationary orbit," the official said.

Measat-3a carries 12 Ku-band and 12 C-band active transponders along with three antennas, and has a service life of 15 years.
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