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Newly Discovered Nearby Asteroid Found Orbiting Sun Backwards

Jeff Hecht
New Scientist
Sun, 03 May 2009 18:11 UTC
Image
© NASA/JPL
The discovery of a 2- to 3-kilometre-wide asteroid in an orbit that goes backwards has set astronomers scratching their heads. It comes closer to Earth than any other object in a 'retrograde' orbit, and astronomers think they should have spotted it before.

The object, called 2009 HC82, was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona on the morning of 29 April.

From observations of its position by five different groups, Sonia Keys of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center calculated it orbits the sun every 3.39 years on a path that ventures within 3.5 million km of the Earth's orbit. Combined with its size, that makes 2009 HC82 a potentially hazardous asteroid.

What's really unusual is that the calculated orbit is inclined 155° to the plane of the Earth's orbit. That means that as it orbits the Sun, it actually travels backwards compared to the planets. It is only the 20th asteroid known in a retrograde orbit, a very rare group. None of the others comes as close to the Earth.
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Light Sabers

Propaganda Level 6: The internet is draining world's power

Bobbie Johnson
The Guardian
Sun, 03 May 2009 15:33 UTC
Image
© Dan Chung
This was the photo chosen by the Guardian to accompany this article. Note the suggestion being made here: too many internet users are gobbling too little finite resources i.e. China
The internet's increasing appetite for electricity poses a major threat to companies such as Google, according to scientists and industry executives.

Leading figures have told the Guardian that many internet companies are struggling to manage the costs of delivering billions of web pages, videos and files online - in a "perfect storm" that could even threaten the future of the internet itself.

"In an energy-constrained world, we cannot continue to grow the footprint of the internet ... we need to rein in the energy consumption," said Subodh Bapat, vice-president at Sun Microsystems, one of the world's largest manufacturers of web servers.
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Chalkboard

The Biocentric Universe Theory: Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself

Robert Lanza and Bob Berman
Discover Magazine
Sun, 03 May 2009 05:06 UTC
Stem-cell guru Robert Lanza presents a radical new view of the universe and everything in it.

Image
© NASA/ESA/A. Schaller (for STScI)

NASA Hubble Space Telescope Collection
Adapted from Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, published by BenBella Books in May 2009.

The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.

This insight snapped into focus one day while one of us (Lanza) was walking through the woods. Looking up, he saw a huge golden orb web spider tethered to the overhead boughs. There the creature sat on a single thread, reaching out across its web to detect the vibrations of a trapped insect struggling to escape. The spider surveyed its universe, but everything beyond that gossamer pinwheel was incomprehensible. The human observer seemed as far-off to the spider as telescopic objects seem to us. Yet there was something kindred: We humans, too, lie at the heart of a great web of space and time whose threads are connected according to laws that dwell in our minds.
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Magic Wand

'Invisibility Cloak' successfully hides objects


ScienceDaily.com
Sun, 03 May 2009 08:52 UTC
The great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously noted the similarities between advanced technology and magic. This summer on the big screen, the young wizard Harry Potter will once again don his magic invisibility cloak and disappear. Meanwhile, researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley will be studying an invisibility cloak of their own that also hides objects from view.
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Sherlock

Finally Unearthing the Secrets of Our Neanderthal Cousins

Dorothy H Crawford
The Scotsman
Sat, 02 May 2009 09:00 UTC
The human genome sequence, published in 2003, is revealing a multitude of secrets. And when the chimpanzee genome followed in 2005, we discovered just how similar humans are to our closest living relative.

Now scientists have a draft genome sequence from the extinct Neanderthals (homo neanderthalensis) and are poised to clear up many long-debated issues, not least how like us our ancient cousins really were.

About 100 years ago, the anthropologist Sir Harry Johnston described Neanderthals as "gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possible cannibalistic tendencies". And 50 years ago, in his novel The Inheritors, William Golding portrayed the Neanderthal hero, Lok, as a gentle giant. Can we now expect an accurate picture of our mysterious cousins?

Modern humans (homo sapiens) and Neanderthals split from a common ancestor in Africa some 500,000 years ago. Neanderthals colonised Europe, and, from around 130,000 to 28,000 years ago, roamed an area stretching from Spain to Siberia, including southern Britain. Modern humans arrived in Eurasia from Africa about 45,000 years ago, and the cousins co-existed in Europe for about 15,000 years before Neanderthals became extinct.
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Magnify

"Dark Age" Temple Found in Turkey

Mati Milstein
National Geographic News
Sat, 02 May 2009 01:40 UTC
Image
© James Osborne, courtesy Tim Harrison
The remains of a temple (above) in southwestern Turkey may cast new light on the "dark age" that was thought to have engulfed the region from 1200 to 900 B.C., researchers announced in April 2009.

Ornate decorations and stone slabs carved with hieroglyphs suggest that, despite the written record, the time period might not have been marked only by cultural collapse, famine, and violence.
An ancient temple in Turkey has been found filled with broken metal, ivory carvings, and stone slabs engraved with a dead language.

The find is casting new light on the "dark age" that was thought to have engulfed the region from 1200 to 900 B.C.

Written sources from the era - including the Old Testament of the Bible, Greek Homeric epics, and texts from Egyptian pharaoh Ramses III - record the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age as a turbulent period of cultural collapse, famine, and violence.
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Magnify

Indus Valley code is cracked - maybe

Raja Murthy
Asia Times Online
Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:28 UTC
Image
A 4,500-year-old mystery has been revived, with Indian-American scientists claiming on April 23 that the puzzling symbols that were found on Indus Valley seals are indeed the written script of a language from an ancient civilization.

But skeptics, such as historian Steve Farmer and Harvard University Indologist Michael Witzel, say that claims of the Indus Valley civilization having a written language, and therefore a literate culture, are generally created by pseudo-nationalists from India, Hindu chauvinists and right-wing political frauds who wish to glorify the existence of an ancient Hindu civilization.

The civilization on the banks of the 2,900-kilometer long Indus, one of the world's great rivers with a water volume twice that of the Nile, is said to have flourished between 2600 BC to 1900 BC.
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Info

First dino 'blood' extracted from ancient bone

Jeff Hecht
New Scientist
Fri, 01 May 2009 14:50 UTC
Image
© Mary H. Schweitzer
Multiple hadrosaur red blood "cells" surrounded by white, fibrous matrix.
A dinosaur bone buried for 80 million years has yielded a mix of proteins and microstructures resembling cells. The finding is important because it should resolve doubts about a previous report that also claimed to have extracted dino tissue from fossils.

Proteins such as collagen are far more durable than DNA, but they had not been expected to last the 65 million years since the dinosaurs died out. So palaeontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University attracted wide attention when she reported finding first soft tissue and later collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone that was intact until it was broken during excavation.

Yet critics said the extraordinary claim required extraordinary evidence, and asked for protein sequences, better handling of samples to prevent contamination, and confirmation analyses from other laboratories.

So Schweitzer took a look at the pristine leg bone of a plant-eating hadrosaur that had been encased in sandstone for 80 million years. She and colleagues exhaustively tested the sample, sequencing the proteins they found with a new and better mass spectrometer and sending samples to two other labs for verification.
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Info

Dancing parrots could help explain evolution of rhythm

Sandrine Ceurstemont
New Scientist
Fri, 01 May 2009 14:33 UTC
Dancing parrots have revealed that humans aren't the only animals that can groove to different beats. Two new studies have found that parrots kept their dancing synchronised to human music, even when the rhythm changed.


It was previously thought that the human brain had evolved a special capacity for music, since other animals aren't commonly seen moving in time to sounds in the wild. But now researchers think that moving to a beat is linked the ability to mimic.
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Laptop

Study: 'I want my Internet on TV'

David Katzmaier
cnet.com
Fri, 01 May 2009 05:24 UTC
A new study by the Consumer Electronics Association, the industry group representing electronics manufacturers, finds that nearly half of prospective TV buyers say they want to buy an Internet-connected TV.

The study, conducted in December 2008, asked respondents to say how they'd use their connected sets, and the most popular answers included accessing information about current TV shows or identifying a song played on a show (48 percent) and finding out more about the actors (44 percent). Asked whether they currently surf the Web while watching TV, 30 percent of "online adults" responded "always or usually" while 32 percent answered "sometimes."
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