Science & Technology

Global tsunami monitoring could follow from discovery

Henrique Kugler
AlertNet
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:06 UTC

© Unknown
Airglow waves captured by the Illinois imaging system over Hawaii. The red line represents the location of the ocean-level tsunami at the time of the image.

Researchers from Brazil, France and the United States, using a highly sensitive, wide-angle camera at the top of Haleakala volcano in Hawaii, detected the 'airglow' signature in the atmosphere of the 11 March tsunami that devastated Japan, demonstrating that the genesis of a tsunami leaves a fingerprint in the ionosphere - an ionised zone of the atmosphere more than 80 kilometres up.

Tsunamis usually cause the sea level to rise rapidly by a few centimetres, which displaces the air immediately above it. This creates waves in the air that move quickly upward, eventually reaching and disturbing the ionosphere. Interaction with the charged ionosphere creates a faint red glow, the signature airglow that can be detected.

This effect was predicted in the 1970s, but little progress has been made since then on using these observation methods. The researchers presented their observations in a paper in Geophysical Research Letters last month (7 July).

"We have been studying the ionosphere since 1999, but we didn't expect to end up with a new method for tsunami detection," Jonathan Makela, an electrical engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States, and the lead author of the paper, told SciDev.Net.

Stars as Cool as the Human Body

Science@NASA
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:03 UTC

© Unknown
This artist's conception illustrates what a "Y dwarf" might look like. Y dwarfs are the coldest star-like bodies known, with temperatures that can be even cooler than the human body.

Scientists using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered six "Y dwarfs"-- star-like bodies with temperatures as cool as the human body.

Astronomers hunted these dark orbs for more than a decade without success. When viewed with a visible-light telescope, they are nearly impossible to see. WISE's infrared vision allowed the telescope to finally spot the faint glow of a half dozen Y dwarfs relatively close to our sun, within a distance of about 40 light-years.

"WISE scanned the entire sky for these and other objects, and was able to spot their feeble light with its highly sensitive infrared vision," says Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The Y's are the coldest members of the brown dwarf family. Brown dwarfs are sometimes referred to as "failed" stars. They are too low in mass to fuse atoms at their cores and thus don't burn with the fires that keep stars like our sun shining steadily for billions of years. Instead, these objects cool and fade with time, until what little light they do emit is at infrared wavelengths. The atmospheres of brown dwarfs are similar to those of gas giant planets like Jupiter, but they are easier to observe because they are alone in space, away from the blinding light of a parent star.

Dwarf Planet Pluto Holds Big Surprises for Speedy NASA Probe

Charles Q. Choi
SPACE.com
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:30 UTC

© Dan Durda
To be dispatched early 2006, the outward bound New Horizons spacecraft will throw new light on distant Pluto and its moon, Charon, as well as Kuiper Belt objects.

Pluto may be small, but it is proving to be big on surprises. With NASA's New Horizons spacecraft now speeding toward it, our understanding of the dwarf planet should transform even further.

"We've never had a reconnaissance of a dwarf planet such as Pluto before, and every time we've been to a new type of planet, we find nature is much richer than we expected," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., told SPACE.com.

New Horizons, which was sent aloft in 2006, has been billed by NASA as its fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth, having sped from our planet at about 36,000 mph (nearly 58,000 kph). The probe should reach Pluto and its moons in July 2015.

Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors: A New Piece to the Puzzle of Brain Function

Science Daily
Sat, 20 Aug 2011 17:19 UTC

Researchers at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen have collaborated with the company NeuroSearch to generate new knowledge about an important part of the brain's complex communication system. The discovery could form the basis for future development of better medicines for patients with psychiatric disorders.

The results were recently published Journal of Neuroscience.

New knowledge challenges established scientific ideas about the function of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, which play an important role in the health of the brain. As its name suggests, the class of receptors is significant for the effects of nicotine and is linked to addiction -- however, life-threatening conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease are also linked to the electrical impulses that are mediated by nicotinic acetylcholine receptors.

Evidence of elusive 'God particle' fades

Raw Story
Mon, 22 Aug 2011 16:51 UTC

Washington - International scientists searching to solve the greatest riddle in all of physics said Monday that signs are fading of the elusive Higgs-Boson particle, which is believed to give objects mass.

Just last month, physicists announced at a European conference that a big atom-smasher experiment had shown tantalizing hints of the Higgs-Boson, as the search to identify the particle enters the final stretch with results expected late next year.

Sometimes described as the "God particle" because it is such a mystery yet such a potent force of nature, the Higgs-Boson -- if it exists -- represents the final piece of the Standard Model of physics.

Growth of Egg Freezing Blurs 'Experimental' Label

Alison Motluk
Nature
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 13:59 UTC

© L. VAN LIESHOUT / AFP / Getty
Freezing eggs in liquid nitrogen to extend women’s reproductive years is becoming commonplace, but data are lacking about outcomes from older eggs.

The first thing that Alison Hopkins did after finishing her PhD was freeze 14 of her eggs. She knew she wanted children, but she was 38 and didn't have a partner. "It buys you time, it eliminates any pressure," she says. "I thought it was a really good insurance policy."

For such women, however, egg freezing is "a shot in the dark", says Hopkins' fertility specialist, John Jain, who heads Santa Monica Fertility in California. Very few of the older women who have frozen eggs to beat the clock have tried to use them, says Jain. He estimates that, worldwide, fewer than ten babies have been born from eggs frozen for women aged 38 or over. And no one knows how successful the freezing and thawing of older eggs will be - despite the fact that most women now seeking the service are over 38.

These uncertainties are reflected in the recommendations of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) - the advisory body to the fertility industry - but not in the practices of its members, even some of those who formulate the guidelines. The ASRM states clearly that oocyte cryopreservation should not yet be offered to older women as a way of extending their fertility. It also says that all egg freezing should be considered experimental, and be performed as part of a research project governed by an institutional review board (IRB), which is supposed to monitor, review and approve the research.

Did Einstein Discover E=MC2?

Philip Ball
Physics World.
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 13:46 UTC

Who discovered that E = mc²? It's not as easy a question as you might think. Scientists ranging from James Clerk Maxwell and Max von Laue to a string of now-obscure early 20th-century physicists have been proposed as the true discovers of the mass - energy equivalence now popularly credited to Einstein's theory of special relativity. These claims have spawned headlines accusing Einstein of plagiarism, but many are spurious or barely supported. Yet two physicists have now shown that Einstein's famous formula does have a complicated and somewhat ambiguous genesis - which has little to do with relativity.

One of the more plausible precursors to E = mc² is attributed to Fritz Hasenöhrl, a physics professor at the University of Vienna. In a 1904 paper Hasenöhrl clearly wrote down the equation E = 3/8mc.² Where did he get it from, and why is the constant of proportionality wrong? Stephen Boughn of Haverford College in Pennsylvania and Mark Rothman of Princeton University examine this question in a paper submitted to the arXiv preprint server.

Hasenöhrl's name has a certain notoriety now, as he is commonly invoked by anti-Einstein cranks. His reputation as the man who really discovered E = mc² owes much to the efforts of the antisemitic and pro-Nazi physics Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard, who sought to separate Einstein's name from the theory of relativity so that it was not seen as a product of "Jewish science".

When algorithms control the world: If you were expecting some kind warning when computers finally get smarter than us, then think again

Jane Wakefield
BBC
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 11:46 UTC

There will be no soothing HAL 9000-type voice informing us that our human services are now surplus to requirements.

In reality, our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe.

Their weapon of choice - the algorithm.

Behind every smart web service is some even smarter web code. From the web retailers - calculating what books and films we might be interested in, to Facebook's friend finding and image tagging services, to the search engines that guide us around the net.

It is these invisible computations that increasingly control how we interact with our electronic world.

Floating City, Libertarian Colonies Close to Reality

Marianne English
Discovery News
Mon, 22 Aug 2011 10:04 UTC

Cities come in all shapes and sizes, but can they float?

PayPal founder Peter Thiel recently invested $1.25 million to try to make that happen. By offering support to the Seasteading Institute, he has jump-started efforts to create city-state communities afloat on ocean platforms. In 2009, the institute held a 3D design competition to help people visualize what these sea-bound communities may look like (see photos above and below).

The structures will be 12,000 tons, diesel-powered and carry around 270 people per unit, as reported by Details Magazine. The idea is to link the structures together to create ocean metropolises equipped to accommodate millions of people.

Galaxies Are Running Out of Gas: Study

PhysOrg
Mon, 22 Aug 2011 06:42 UTC

A new study has shown why the lights are going out in the Universe.

The Universe forms fewer stars than it used to, and a CSIRO study has now shown why - the galaxies are running out of gas.

Dr Robert Braun (CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science) and his colleagues used CSIRO's Mopra radio telescope near Coonabarabran, NSW, to study far-off galaxies and compare them with nearby ones.

Light (and radio waves) from the distant galaxies has taken time to travel to us, so we see the galaxies as they were between three and five billion years ago.

Galaxies at this stage of the Universe's life appear to contain considerably more molecular hydrogen gas than comparable galaxies in today's Universe, the research team found.

Stars form from clouds of molecular hydrogen. The less molecular hydrogen there is, the fewer stars will form.

The research team's paper is in press in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Only the remaining 10% of The Great Jab lottery are supposed to go through the "cold, dark winter".

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Science & Technology

Global tsunami monitoring could follow from discovery

Stars as Cool as the Human Body

Dwarf Planet Pluto Holds Big Surprises for Speedy NASA Probe

Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors: A New Piece to the Puzzle of Brain Function

Evidence of elusive 'God particle' fades

Growth of Egg Freezing Blurs 'Experimental' Label

Did Einstein Discover E=MC2?

When algorithms control the world: If you were expecting some kind warning when computers finally get smarter than us, then think again

Floating City, Libertarian Colonies Close to Reality

Galaxies Are Running Out of Gas: Study

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