Science & TechnologyS


Mr. Potato

Cybertot fleshes out future of robotics

A robot that looks and moves eerily like a human child is set to go into mass production.

Magnify

Three Chemists Win Nobel Prize

One Japanese and two American scientists have won this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for taking the ability of some jellyfish to glow and transforming it into a ubiquitous tool of molecular biology for watching the dance of living cells and the proteins within them.

Telescope

Star Born From The Wind: Unique Multi-wavelength Portrait Of Star Birth

Telescopes on the ground and in space have teamed up to compose a colourful image that offers a fresh look at the history of the star-studded region NGC 346. This new, ethereal portrait, in which different wavelengths of light swirl together like watercolours, reveals new information about how stars form.
 bright star-forming region NGC 346
© ESO/ESA/JPL-Caltech/NASA/D. Gouliermis (MPIA) et al.This new portrait of the bright star-forming region NGC 346, in which different wavelengths of light swirl together like watercolours, reveals new information about how stars form. NGC 346 is located 210 000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a neighbouring dwarf galaxy of the Milky Way. The image is based on data from ESA XMM-Newton (X-rays; blue), ESO's New Technology Telescope (visible light; green), and NASA's Spitzer (infrared; red). The infrared light shows cold dust, while the visible light denotes glowing gas, and the X-rays represent very hot gas. Ordinary stars appear as blue spots with white centres, while young stars enshrouded in dust appear as red spots with white centres.

The picture combines infrared, visible and X-ray light from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, ESO's New Technology Telescope (NTT) and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope, respectively. The NTT visible-light images allowed astronomers to uncover glowing gas in the region and the multi-wavelength image reveals new insights that appear only thanks to this unusual combination of information.

NGC 346 is the brightest star-forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud, an irregular dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way at a distance of 210 000 light-years.

"NGC 346 is a real astronomical zoo," says Dimitrios Gouliermis of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and lead author of the paper describing the observations. "When we combined data at various wavelengths, we were able to tease apart what's going on in different parts of this intriguing region."

Magnify

DNA Could Reveal Your Surname

Scientists at the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester - where the revolutionary technique of genetic fingerprinting was invented by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys -- are developing techniques which may one day allow police to work out someone's surname from the DNA alone.
Y chromosome
© iStockphoto/Mark EvansThe Y chromosome confers maleness and is passed, like surnames, from father to son. Scientists believe that a link could exist between a man's surname and the type of Y chromosome he carries.

Doctoral research by Turi King has shown that men with the same British surname are highly likely to be genetically linked. The results of her research have implications in the fields of forensics, genealogy, epidemiology and the history of surnames.

On Wednesday 8th October Dr King will present the key findings of her Ph.D. research in which she recruited over two and a half thousand men bearing over 500 different surnames to take part in the study. Carried out in Professor Mark Jobling's lab, Dr Turi King's research involved exploring this potential link between surname and Y chromosome type.

Telescope

Cosmic Eye Sheds Light On Early Galaxy Formation, Just Two Billion Years After Big Bang

A Cosmic Eye has given scientists a unique insight into galaxy formation in the very early Universe. Using gravity from a foreground galaxy as a zoom lens the team was able to see a young star-forming galaxy in the distant Universe as it appeared only two billion years after the Big Bang.
Cosmic Eye
© Mark Swinbank/Durham UniversityThe Cosmic Eye, showing the foreground galaxy in yellow at the centre of the image surrounded by the blue arc of the distant galaxy.

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), USA, and Durham University and Cardiff University, UK, are behind the research published October 9 in the scientific journal Nature.

The researchers, led by Dr Dan Stark, of Caltech, say their findings show for the first time how the distant galaxy might evolve to become a present-day system like our Milky Way.

And they say their study also provides a taste of what astronomers will be able to see in the distant Universe once projects such as the planned European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) and the American Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) come into use.

Telescope

Spacecraft Reveals Stunning New Views of Mercury

A NASA probe has begun beaming back stunning new images from its successful second flyby of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun.

NASA's MESSENGER probe captured never-before-seen views of the Mercury during its encounter on Monday. The spacecraft zipped past Mercury for the second time this year and used the planet's gravity to adjust its path as it continues en route to become the first probe to orbit the planet in March 2011.

One new image shows large patterns of ray-like lines extending southward across much of the planet surface from a young, newly-imaged crater. The previously-imaged Kuiper crater and others craters also have similar webs of lines radiating outward.

Another raw picture represents the highest-resolution color image ever taken of Mercury's surface, and came just 9 minutes after the spacecraft's closest approach to Mercury at 4:43 a.m. EDT (0845 GMT). Details include a large impact basin with an 83-mile (133-km) diameter, named Polygnotus for a Greek painter from the 5th century B.C.
Mercury's surface
© NASA/JHUAPL/CIWThis portion of Mercury's surface was previously imaged under different lighting conditions by Mariner 10, but this new MESSENGER image mosaic is the highest-resolution color imaging ever acquired of any portion of Mercury's surface from its Oct. 6, 2008 flyby. The largest impact feature at the top of the image is about 133 kilometers (83 miles) in diameter and is named Polygnotus.

Telescope

Stars Stop Forming When Big Galaxies Collide

Astronomers studying new images of a nearby galaxy cluster have found evidence that high-speed collisions between large elliptical galaxies may prevent new stars from forming, according to a paper to be published in a November 2008 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
M86-NGC4438 complex
© Tomer Tal and Jeffrey Kenney/Yale University and NOAO/AURA/NSFM86-NGC4438 complex: A deep image of part of the Virgo cluster revealing tendrils of ionized hydrogen gas 400,000 light-years long that connect the elliptical galaxy M86 (right) and the disturbed spiral galaxy NGC 4438 (left). Taken with the wide-field Mosaic imager on the National Science Foundation's Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory.

Led by Jeffrey Kenney, professor and chair of astronomy at Yale, the team saw a spectacular complex of warm gas filaments 400,000 light-years-long connecting the elliptical galaxy M86 and the spiral galaxy NGC 4438 in the Virgo galaxy cluster, providing striking evidence for a previously unsuspected high-speed collision between the galaxies. The view was constructed using the wide-field Mosaic imager on the National Science Foundation telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona.

Telescope

Cassini Flyby Of Saturn Moon Offers Insight Into Solar System History

NASA's Cassini spacecraft is scheduled to fly within 16 miles of Saturn's moon Enceladus on Oct. 9 and measure molecules in its space environment that could give insight into the history of the solar system.
Enceladus
© NASA/JPLThis sweeping mosaic of Saturn's moon Enceladus provides broad regional context for the ultra-sharp, close-up views NASA's Cassini spacecraft acquired minutes earlier, during its flyby on Aug. 11, 2008.

"This encounter will potentially have far-reaching implications for understanding how the solar system was formed and how it evolved," said professor Tamas Gombosi, chair of the University of Michigan Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences.

Gombosi is the interdisciplinary scientist for magnetosphere and plasma science on the Cassini mission. His role is to coordinate studies that involve multiple plasma instruments on the spacecraft.

Enceladus is Saturn's sixth-largest moon, orbiting within the planet's outermost ring. It is approximately 313 miles in diameter.

Family

Evolution stops here? Future Man will look the same, says scientist

For centuries, writers have attempted to predict the future of the human race.

Some have argued that we are destined to evolve into super-beings, others that we are turning into dim-witted goblins incapable of anything more demanding than watching TV.

But according to a leading geneticist, both visions are wrong because human evolution has ground to a halt.

Palette

Revealed: The cave paintings which could show how humans survived dramatic climate change during the Ice Age

prehistoric art
Prehistoric find: The caves in northern Spain contain more than 300 images of animals - the largest ever found on the Iberian peninsula
British scientists are set to unlock the secrets of hidden cave paintings which could reveal how humans survived during the changing climate of the Ice Age more than 15,000 years ago.

The paintings, concealed in the caves of northern Spain, will be dated accurately for the first time by experts from the University of Bristol using a new technique based on the radioactive decay of uranium.

A team from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology has just returned from an expedition to the Cantabria and Asturias regions of Spain, where they removed samples from more than 20 prehistoric painted caves.