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Hubble Catches Jupiter's Largest Moon Going To The 'Dark Side'


Science Daily
Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:48 UTC
Jupiter and Ganymede
© NASA, ESA, and E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona)
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has caught Jupiter's moon Ganymede playing a game of "peek-a-boo." In this crisp Hubble image, Ganymede is shown just before it ducks behind the giant planet. This color photo was made from three images taken on April 9, 2007, with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in red, green, and blue filters. The image shows Jupiter and Ganymede in close to natural colors.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has caught Jupiter's moon Ganymede playing a game of "peek-a-boo." In this crisp Hubble image, Ganymede is shown just before it ducks behind the giant planet.

Ganymede completes an orbit around Jupiter every seven days. Because Ganymede's orbit is tilted nearly edge-on to Earth, it routinely can be seen passing in front of and disappearing behind its giant host, only to reemerge later.

Composed of rock and ice, Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system. It is even larger than the planet Mercury. But Ganymede looks like a dirty snowball next to Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. Jupiter is so big that only part of its Southern Hemisphere can be seen in this image.
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Magnify

Thera volcano catastrophe dated to 1613 BCE


Archaeo News
Sat, 06 Dec 2008 08:44 UTC
Two olive branches buried by a Minoan-era eruption of the volcano on the island of Thera (modern-day Santorini, Greece) have enabled precise radiocarbon dating of the catastrophe to 1613 BCE, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 years, according to two researchers who presented conclusions of their previously published research during an event at the Danish Archaeological Institute of Athens.

Speaking at an event entitled 'The Enigma of Dating the Minoan Eruption - Data from Santorini and Egypt', the study's authors, Dr. Walter Friedrich of the Danish University of Aarhus and Dr. Walter Kutschera of the Austrian University of Vienna, said data left by the branch of an olive tree with 72 annular growth rings was used for dating via the radiocarbon method, while a second olive branch - found just nine metres away from the first - was unearthed in July 2007 and has not yet been analysed. The researchers said both olive tree branches were found near a Bronze Age man-made wall, giving the impression that they were part of an olive grove situated near a settlement very close to the edge of Santorini's current world-famous Caldera. The two trees were found standing when unearthed, and apparently had been covered by the Theran pumice immediately after the volcano's eruption.
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Info

New Model Explains Movements Of The Moon


Science Daily
Sat, 20 Dec 2008 23:27 UTC
Image
© NASA
Installation of CCRs on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission.
Two researchers from the universities of Valladolid and Alicante are developing a mathematical formula to study the rotation of the moon, taking into account its structure, which comprises a solid external layer and a fluid internal core.

Their work is part of an international study, which has come up with an improved theoretical model about the orbital and rotational dynamics of the Earth and its satellite, and which the scientific community will be able to use to obtain more precise measurements in order to aid future NASA missions to the moon.

Juan J. A. Getino, from the Applied Mathematics Department of the University of Valladolid, and Alberto Escapa, from the Applied Mathematics Department of the Higher Polytechnic School of the University of Alicante, suggest in their work that the Earth and the moon should be considered as "multi-layered" systems. In order to analyse their movements, the researchers have used Hamiltonian mechanics, a kind of classical mechanics used, among other things, to study the movements of heavenly bodies in response to gravitational effects.
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Roses

NY exhibit unveils women's lives in ancient Greece

Verena Dobnik
Associated Press
Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:54 UTC
women of ancient greece
© AP Photo/Onassis Cultural Center
This undated photo provided by the Onassis Cultural Center shows a 425 - 400 B.C. clay vase depicting a woman carrying a vase and a basket in preparation for an animal sacrifice ritual. A woman's place has never been just in the home - not even in ancient Greece.
A woman's place has never been just in the home - not even in ancient Greece.

The proof is in an exhibit titled "Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens" - a collection of artifacts that correct the cliched idea of Athenian women as passive, homebound nurturers of men and children.

In the display covering Greek life, art and religion, women play important, vibrant roles, as do their goddesses - from lover to priestess to political peacemaker to protagonist of public festivals.

"Today's woman has more in common with the woman of ancient Athens than one imagines," said curator Stella Chryssoulaki. She pointed to a vase showing a group of women who escaped city life, getting together in the countryside for a three-day festival honoring their beloved god Dionysius. They talked and shared lots of wine, leaving their husbands behind.
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Info

'Hobbit' Fossils Represent A New Species, Concludes Anthropologist


Science Daily
Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:36 UTC
Homo floresiensis
© Karen L. Baab and Kieran P. McNulty.
Data collected from the LB1 cranium (superimposed on the original photo) of Homo floresiensis. Size, shape, and asymmetry in fossil hominins: The status of the LB1 cranium based on 3D morphometric analyses.
University of Minnesota anthropology professor Kieran McNulty (along with colleague Karen Baab of Stony Brook University in New York) has made an important contribution toward solving one of the greatest paleoanthropological mysteries in recent history -- that fossilized skeletons resembling a mythical "hobbit" creature represent an entirely new species in humanity's evolutionary chain.

Discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, controversy has surrounded the fossilized hominid skeletons of the so-called "hobbit people," or Homo floresiensis ever since. Experts are still debating whether the 18,000-year-old remains merely belong to a diminutive population of modern-day humans (with one individual exhibiting "microcephaly," an abnormally small head) or represent a previously unrecognized branch in humanity's family tree.

Using 3D modeling methods, McNulty and his fellow researchers compared the cranial features of this real-life "hobbit" to those of a simulated fossil human (of similar stature) to determine whether or not such a species was distinct from modern humans.
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Display

Scientists use PlayStations to create supercomputer

Paul Jay
CBC News
Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:21 UTC
Computer hobbyists and researchers take note: two U.S. scientists have created a step-by-step guide on how to build a supercomputer using multiple PlayStation 3 video-game consoles.

The instructional guide, posted this week online at ps3cluster.org, allows users with some programming knowledge to install a version of the open-source operating system Linux on the video consoles and connect a number of consoles into a computing cluster or grid.

The two researchers say the guide could provide scientists with another, cheaper alternative to renting time on supercomputers to run their simulations.

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth physics professor Gaurav Khanna first built the cluster a year ago to run his simulations estimating the gravitational waves produced when two black holes merged.
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Einstein

Intelligent soldiers most likely to die in battle

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:28 UTC
Being dumb has its benefits. Scottish soldiers who survived the second world war were less intelligent than men who gave their lives defeating the Third Reich, a new study of British government records concludes.

The 491 Scots who died and had taken IQ tests at age 11 achieved an average IQ score of 100.8. Several thousand survivors who had taken the same test - which was administered to all Scottish children born in 1921 - averaged 97.4.

The unprecedented demands of the second world war - fought more with brains than with brawn compared with previous wars - might account for the skew, says Ian Deary, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, who led the study. Dozens of other studies have shown that smart people normally live longer than their less intelligent peers.
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Satellite

Mars lander updates Twitter users with 'tweets'


Agence France-Presse
Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:56 UTC
If the Phoenix Lander comes back to life on Mars, Twitter users could be among the first to know.

NASA gave the historic Space Age mission an Internet Age spin by adding a Twitter page, enabling the robotic interplanetary explorer to answer the hot micro-blogging website's trademark query: "What are you doing?"

Twitter rocketed to popularity with technology that lets people use mobile telephones or personal computers to continually keep friends updated on their activities with "tweets," text messages of no more than 140 characters.
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Satellite

Mars had climate change


InTheNews.co.uk
Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:51 UTC
Mars
© NASA
Mars has been through major climate changes, similar to the Earth's ice age, scientists have discovered. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) found evidence of ancient climate change on Mars caused by regular variation in the planet's tilt, or obliquity.

On Earth, a similar astronomical effect drives ice-age cycles.

The researchers used a high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to measure the layering on rock outcrops in four craters on the planet. Based on the analysis, the scientists concluded each layer was formed over a period of about 100,000 years and was produced by the same cyclical climate changes.
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Telescope

Burrowing black holes devoured first stars from within

David Shiga
New Scientist
Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:28 UTC
Image
© SPL
Swarms of tiny black holes forged in the big bang may have killed off the universe's first stars by devouring them from within. The digested end-products could then have grown into the colossal black holesMovie Camera now lurking in the centres of galaxies, whose origins have long been a mystery.

Some physicists speculate that minuscule black holes may have been forged in the very dense soup of matter and radiation that prevailed in the first moments of the universe's existence. If so, these might account for at least some of the invisible dark matter that pervades the universe.

Now Cosimo Bambi of the University of Tokyo in Japan and colleagues have shown that these black holes could also have destroyed the universe's first stars by eating them from the inside out.

The first stars are thought to have formed around 200 million years after the big bang, in the centres of the universe's densest dark matter clumps. Stars would have been most likely to ignite there because the dark matter's gravity would have pulled in the gas necessary for them to form.
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