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Iberian Peninsula's Earliest Agricultural Systems Were Unsustainable


Science Daily
Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:57 UTC
Archaeological site
© SINC / A. Rovira
Archaeological site of Los Castillejos, Granada.
A team of Catalan and Andalusian researchers has proved that the first agricultural systems on the Iberian Peninsula became ever more unsustainable with the passage of time. The study involved the analysis of fossilised grains of wheat and barley from Los Castillejos (Granada), an area of archaeological remains where cereals were cultivated between 4000 and 2500 BCE.

Mónica Aguilera, an engineer from the Vegetable Physiology Unit at the University of Barcelona (UB) and co-author of the study, told SINC that the natural levels of stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes were measured in order to estimate the yield and nutritional status of the ancient crops. "The size of the grain and levels of the carbon 13 (13C) isotopes allowed us to estimate yield, while the nutritional status of the crop was analysed by measuring levels of the nitrogen 15 (15N) isotopes," the researcher explained.

Figures revealed by the study show a reduction of around 35% in the yield of wheat crops and 30% in barley between the years 4000 and 2500 BCE (end of the Bronze Age). The average weight of the grains of these cereals also fell by 10 miligrammes (33%) and 12 mg (38%) respectively. The research also revealed a 33% reduction in the nitrogen content of the wheat grains and 56% in barley.
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Pharoah

India: Iron Age burial site in Tamil Nadu being razed

T.S. Subramanian
The Hindu
Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:49 UTC
Burial site
© Unknown
Chennai: An Iron Age burial site dotted with cairn circles, menheirs and cist-slabs, near Vellaripatti village near Madurai on the Madurai-Tiruchi highway, is being destroyed. Archaeologists date the megalithic site between 1000 B.C. and 500 B.C.

Real estate developers have uprooted and swept up hundreds of cairn circles (big stones arranged in the form of circles), menheirs (tall granite slabs erected vertically) and cist-slabs (rectangular granite slabs laid on the ground), all of which mark burial spots. Bulldozers have swept clean a big area that had earlier been crowded with cairn circles, menheirs and cist-slabs. Border stones have been planted in the cleaned-up area to indicate house sites. A fencing post has been erected close to a beautifully laid cairn circle, and it is only a matter of time before this cairn circle disappears.
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Monkey Wrench

Simple device which uses electrical field to boost gas efficiency developed by Temple University researcher


Temple University
Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:56 UTC
Rongjia Tao
© Joseph V. Labolito/Temple University
Rongjia Tao
With the high cost of gasoline and diesel fuel impacting costs for automobiles, trucks, buses and the overall economy, a Temple University physics professor has developed a simple device which could dramatically improve fuel efficiency as much as 20 percent.

Comment: A device that reduces gas consumption by 20 percent, sounds good. That is unless, by some strange coincidence, there just happened to be a 20 percent increase in the price of gas if this were ever to hit market.

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Bizarro Earth

Planet's strange orbit points to planetary billiards

Devin Powell
New Scientist
Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:38 UTC
Collision of planets
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
A collision between planets,like the one illustrated, could have caused the odd orbit of XO-3b
Billions of years ago, something kicked planet XO-3b into a cock-eyed orbit. The culprit may have been another planet, which would mean planets can bounce each other around like cosmic billiard balls.

Guillame Hébrard of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris and colleagues detected an unusual colour shift as XO-3b passed in front of its star. The pattern suggests that its 3.2-day orbit is tilted by 70 degrees (see diagram). "If confirmed, this might be the first planet of this type," says Hébrard.

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Better Earth

How different from Earth are distant exoplanets?

Deborah Byrd, Joel Block, Lindsay Patterson and Jorge Salazar
Earth & Sky Radio Series
Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:50 UTC
Earth
© NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center
Dave Charbonneau: One of the big delights in the last decade has been that we've uncovered a great diversity in the planets orbiting other stars.

Dave Charbonneau is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He's talking about the discovery so far of over 300 exoplanets - planets that lie beyond our solar system.
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Saturn

Chinese astronaut walks in space


BBC News
Sat, 27 Sep 2008 16:22 UTC
A Chinese astronaut has become the first in his country's history to take a walk in space. In an operation broadcast live on national TV, fighter pilot Zhai Zhigang emerged from the capsule orbiting the Earth to wave a Chinese flag.

Mr Zhai, 42, stayed outside the capsule for 15 minutes while his two fellow astronauts stayed in the spacecraft. The exercise is seen as key to China's ambition to build an orbiting station in the next few years.
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Info

Earth's Magnetic Field Reversals Illuminated By Lava Flows Study


Science Daily
Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:25 UTC
Earth's north magnetic pole is shifting and weakening. Ancient lava flows are guiding a better understanding of what generates and controls the Earth's magnetic field - and what may drive it to occasionally reverse direction.

Image
©iStockphoto/Tobias Machhaus
Polarity reversals have occurred hundreds of times at irregular intervals throughout the planet's history - most recently about 780,000 years ago - but scientists are still trying to understand how and why.

The main magnetic field, generated by turbulent currents within the deep mass of molten iron of the Earth's outer core, periodically flips its direction, such that a compass needle would point south rather than north. Such polarity reversals have occurred hundreds of times at irregular intervals throughout the planet's history - most recently about 780,000 years ago - but scientists are still trying to understand how and why.

A new study of ancient volcanic rocks, reported in the Sept. 26 issue of the journal Science, shows that a second magnetic field source may help determine how and whether the main field reverses direction. This second field, which may originate in the shallow core just below the rocky mantle layer of the Earth, becomes important when the main north-south field weakens, as it does prior to reversing, says Brad Singer, a geology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Sherlock

Puzzling Property Of Night-shining Clouds At Edge Of Space Explained


Science Daily
Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:57 UTC
An explanation for a strange property of noctilucent clouds--thin, wispy clouds hovering at the edge of space at 85 km altitude--has been proposed by an experimental plasma physicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), possibly laying to rest a decades-long mystery.

Noctilucent Cloud
©NASA
Noctilucent Cloud

Noctilucent clouds, also known as night-shining clouds, were first described in 1885, two years after the massive eruption of Krakatoa, a volcanic island in Indonesia, sent up a plume of ash and debris up to 80 km into Earth's atmosphere. The eruption affected global climate and weather for years and may have produced the first noctilucent clouds.

The effects of Krakatoa eventually faded, but the unusual electric blue clouds remain, nestled into a thin layer of Earth's mesosphere, the upper atmosphere region where pressure is 10,000 times less than at sea level. The clouds, which are visible during the deep twilight, are most often observed during the summer months at latitudes from 50 to 70 degrees north and south--although in recent years they have been seen as far south as Utah and Colorado. Noctilucent clouds are a summertime phenomenon because, curiously, the atmosphere at 85 km altitude is coldest in summer, promoting the formation of the ice grains that make up the clouds.
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Info

Oldest Known Rocks On Earth Discovered: 4.28 Billion Years Old


Science Daily
Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:47 UTC
The discovery of rocks as old as 4.28 billion years pushes back age of most ancient remnant of Earth's crust by 300 million years.

Image
©Don Francis
These rocks, known as "faux-amphibolites", may be remnants of a portion of Earth's primordial crust -- the first crust that formed at the surface of our planet.

McGill University researchers have discovered the oldest rocks on Earth - a discovery which sheds more light on our planet's mysterious beginnings. These rocks, known as "faux-amphibolites", may be remnants of a portion of Earth's primordial crust - the first crust that formed at the surface of our planet.

The ancient rocks were found in Northern Quebec, along the Hudson's Bay coast, 40 km south of Inukjuak in an area known as the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt.

The discovery was made by Jonathan O'Neil, a Ph.D. candidate at McGill's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Richard W. Carlson, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., Don Francis, a McGill professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Ross K. Stevenson, a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM).
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Bulb

MIT solves 100-year-old engineering problem

Elizabeth A. Thomson
MIT
Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:32 UTC
As a car accelerates up and down a hill then slows to follow a hairpin turn, the airflow around it cannot keep up and detaches from the vehicle. This aerodynamic separation creates additional drag that slows the car and forces the engine to work harder. The same phenomenon affects airplanes, boats, submarines, and even your golf ball.

Now, in work that could lead to ways of controlling the effect with potential impacts on fuel efficiency and more, MIT scientists and colleagues have reported new mathematical and experimental work for predicting where that aerodynamic separation will occur.
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