Science & TechnologyS


Satellite

On The Trail Of A Cosmic Cat


Space Daily
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:11 UTC
Cat's Paw Nebula
© ESO
ESO has just released a stunning new image of the vast cloud known as the Cat's Paw Nebula or NGC 6334. This complex region of gas and dust, where numerous massive stars are born, lies near the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, and is heavily obscured by intervening dust clouds.

Few objects in the sky have been as well named as the Cat's Paw Nebula, a glowing gas cloud resembling the gigantic pawprint of a celestial cat out on an errand across the Universe. British astronomer John Herschel first recorded NGC 6334 in 1837 during his stay in South Africa. Despite using one of the largest telescopes in the world at the time, Herschel seems to have only noted the brightest part of the cloud, seen here towards the lower left.

NGC 6334 lies about 5500 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion) and covers an area on the sky slightly larger than the full Moon. The whole gas cloud is about 50 light-years across. The nebula appears red because its blue and green light are scattered and absorbed more efficiently by material between the nebula and Earth. The red light comes predominantly from hydrogen gas glowing under the intense glare of hot young stars.
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Einstein

Cosmic Currents May Move Faster Than Light

Clara Moskowitz
Space.com
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:07 UTC
While nothing with mass can move faster than the speed of light, scientists now think some weird, faster-than-light currents may be the powerhouse for fast-spinning stars.

The idea may sound heretical to one of most deeply held tenets in physics, which states that the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit.

But the new proposal squeaks by on a loophole in that rule, which insists only that no mass or information exceeds the speed limit.

In this case, a faster-than-light current would pass through certain rapidly spinning stars. This would cause positively charged atoms in the star to move in one direction and negatively charged atoms would move in another. Each individual particle would move slower than the speed of light, but the wave of movement would pass through the star at a rate more rapid than light speed.
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Info

Magnetic Activity in Brain 'Diagnoses Stress Disorder'

Jason Palmer
BBC News
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:11 UTC
Image
The disorder is prevalent among those exposed to life-threatening situations
A one-minute test appears to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder with an accuracy of 90%.

The test measures the tiny magnetic fluctuations that occur as groups of neurons fire in synchrony, even when subjects are not thinking of anything.

These "synchronous neural interactions" have already been shown to distinguish signals from subjects with a range of disorders including Alzheimer's.

The latest work is reported in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

The brain's signals are effectively a symphony of electrical impulses, which in turn drive tiny magnetic fields.

Researchers have measured and mapped these fields, in a pursuit known as magnetoencephalography, since the late 1960s. It has already been used to diagnose tinnitus, and can even predict when people will make mistakes.
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Sun

Crackling Sunspot


Space Weather
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:01 UTC
Sunspot 1041 (a.k.a. "old sunspot 1039") is crackling with solar flares. Over the past few days, it has produced five M-class eruptions. Click here to play a movie of the latest, an M2-flare recorded by STEREO-B at 1756 GMT on Jan. 20th.

Image
© STEREO-B
The ongoing sequence of flares signals a sharp upturn in solar activity. Before this week, the last time the sun produced even a single M-class solar flare was in March 2008--almost two years ago. M-class solar flares have a moderate effect on Earth. Mainly, they boost the ionization of Earth's upper atmosphere and disturb the propagation of terrestrial radio signals.
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Control Panel

Acoustic Levitation: Scientists Use Sound Make Objects Levitate (Video)


The Huffington Post
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:51 UTC
Scientists have developed a sound generator so powerful its shock waves can stun, and even kill people.

Another group of researchers have developed another unusual application for sound: a method of "acoustic levitation" that could help maintain colonies on Mars or the moon by using high-pitched sound waves to remove alien dust.

Wired explains,
Blasting a high-pitched noise from a tweeter into a pipe that focuses the sound waves can create enough pressure to lift troublesome alien dust off surfaces, according to a study published January in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
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Telescope

New Research Suggests that Near-Earth Encounters can "Shake" Asteroids

Jen Hirsch
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:00 UTC
Cambridge, Massachusetts - For decades, astronomers have analyzed the impact that asteroids could have on Earth. New research by MIT Professor of Planetary Science Richard Binzel examines the opposite scenario: that Earth has considerable influence on asteroids - and from a distance much larger than previously thought. The finding helps answer an elusive, decades-long question about where most meteorites come from before they fall to Earth and also opens the door to a new field study of asteroid seismology.

By analyzing telescopic measurements of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), or asteroids that come within 30 million miles of Earth, Binzel has determined that if an NEA travels within a certain range of Earth, roughly one-quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon, it can experience a "seismic shake" strong enough to bring fresh material called "regolith" to its surface. These rarely seen "fresh asteroids" have long interested astronomers because their spectral fingerprints, or how they reflect different wavelengths of light, match 80 percent of all meteorites that fall to Earth, according to a paper by Binzel appearing in the Jan. 21 issue of Nature. The paper suggests that Earth's gravitational pull and tidal forces create these seismic tremors.
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Info

Cave reveals Southwest's abrupt climate swings during Ice Age

Mari N. Jensen
University of Arizona
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:50 UTC
Image
© 2010 Stella Cousins.Sarah Truebe, a geosciences doctoral student at the University of Arizona, checks on an experiment that measures how fast cave formations grow in Arizona's Cave of the Bells.
Ice Age climate records from an Arizona stalagmite link the Southwest's winter precipitation to temperatures in the North Atlantic, according to new research.

The finding is the first to document that the abrupt changes in Ice Age climate known from Greenland also occurred in the southwestern U.S., said co-author Julia E. Cole of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"It's a new picture of the climate in the Southwest during the last Ice Age," said Cole, a UA professor of geosciences. "When it was cold in Greenland, it was wet here, and when it was warm in Greenland, it was dry here."
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Einstein

The entropy force: a new direction for gravity

Martijn van Calmthout
New Scientist
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:07 UTC
Image
© SuperStock/GettyGravity keeps us tumbling back to Earth
Although gravity has been successfully described with laws devised by Isaac Newton and later Albert Einstein, we still don't know how the fundamental properties of the universe combine to create the phenomenon.

Now one theoretical physicist is proposing a radical new way to look at gravity. Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, a prominent and internationally respected string theorist, argues that gravitational attraction could be the result of the way information about material objects is organised in space. If true, it could provide the fundamental explanation we have been seeking for decades.

Verlinde posted his paper to the pre-print physics archive earlier this month, and since then many physicists have greeted the proposal as promising. Nobel laureate and theoretical physicist Gerard 't Hooft of Utrecht University in the Netherlands stresses the ideas need development, but is impressed by Verlinde's approach. "[Unlike] many string theorists Erik is stressing real physical concepts like mass and force, not just fancy abstract mathematics," he says. "That's encouraging from my perspective as a physicist."
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Stop

Car-stopping electropulse cannon to demo 'next month

Lewis Page
The Register
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:39 UTC
Cig-lighter EMP blaster down to suitcase size, apparently

An old friend familiar to every tech buff and sci-fi fan - namely, the circuitry-addling electropulse blaster - has moved a large step closer to reality, according to reports. A vehicle mounted pulse weapon capable of stopping a (modern) car at 200m is to be demonstrated "next month", apparently.

Flight International has the story, uncovered while following up on a recent US Air Force request for an aircraft weapon capable of "disabling moving ground vehicles while minimising harm to occupants". The USAF is more than capable of stopping such vehicles at present, but its existing methods generally reduce the car or truck and its occupants to a few mangled scraps - not to mention destroying a large section of road and quite likely anything else in the general vicinity.

Just how the Air Force will proceed remains to be seen. However the US Marines have for some years been working with California firm Eureka Aerospace to produce an electromagnetic pulse (EMP, aka High Powered Microwave or HPM) weapon for this sort of task.
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Magnify

Scientists Find a Shared Gene in Dogs With Compulsive Behavior

Mark Derr
The New York Times
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:23 UTC
Scientists have linked a gene to compulsive behavior - in dogs.

Researchers studied Doberman pinschers that curled up into balls, sucking their flanks for hours at a time, and found that the afflicted dogs shared a gene. They describe their findings - the first such gene identified in dogs - in a short report this month in Molecular Psychiatry.

Dr. Nicholas Dodman, director of the animal behavior clinic at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, in North Grafton, Mass., and the lead author of the report, said the findings had broad implications for compulsive disorders in people and animals.
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