Science & TechnologyS


Meteor

New study blames dinosaur deaths on big meteor strike

Nuremberg, Germany - A new German-led study has marshalled even more powerful evidence that a single meteor strike 65 million years ago led to the sudden extinction of all the earth's dinosaurs. That theory has dominated dinosaur studies for a couple of decades, but has remained unproven, with some dissidents saying a monstrous volcanic eruption in India caused the extinction.

Peter Schulte of the University of Erlangen and Nuremberg said evidence turned up by scientists in recent years indicated the impact on what is now the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico was the cause.

The review by 41 scientists was published Thursday in the journal Science.

Meteor

Asteroid Killed Off the Dinosaurs, Says International Scientific Panel

Impact
© Don Davis/NASAAn artist's rendering of the moment of impact when an enormous space rock struck the Yucatán peninsula at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
The Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs and more than half of species on Earth, was caused by an asteroid colliding with Earth and not massive volcanic activity, according to a comprehensive review of all the available evidence, published in the journal Science.

A panel of 41 international experts, including UK researchers from Imperial College London, the University of Cambridge, University College London and the Open University, reviewed 20 years' worth of research to determine the cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction, which happened around 65 million years ago. The extinction wiped out more than half of all species on the planet, including the dinosaurs, bird-like pterosaurs and large marine reptiles, clearing the way for mammals to become the dominant species on Earth.

The new review of the evidence shows that the extinction was caused by a massive asteroid slamming into Earth at Chicxulub (pronounced chick-shoo-loob) in Mexico. The asteroid, which was around 15 kilometres wide, is believed to have hit Earth with a force one billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. It would have blasted material at high velocity into the atmosphere, triggering a chain of events that caused a global winter, wiping out much of life on Earth in a matter of days.

Telescope

Biggest, Deepest Crater Exposes Hidden, Ancient Moon

Image
© Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency/NASA Image 1: This is elevation map covering the eastern portion of South Pole-Aitken basin, including the Apollo Basin, made using data from Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft. The false colors indicate height; red represents highlands, and blue represents the lowest areas. Dashed circles mark the location of the main and inner ring of Apollo. The dashed line marks the location of the topographic profile illustrated in the Image 2 below.
Shortly after the Moon formed, an asteroid smacked into its southern hemisphere and gouged out a truly enormous crater, the South Pole-Aitken basin, almost 1,500 miles across and more than five miles deep.

"This is the biggest, deepest crater on the Moon -- an abyss that could engulf the United States from the East Coast through Texas," said Noah Petro of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The impact punched into the layers of the lunar crust, scattering that material across the Moon and into space. The tremendous heat of the impact also melted part of the floor of the crater, turning it into a sea of molten rock.

Video

YouTube extends automatic captioning to all English videos

Image
YouTube, in a significant development for deaf Web users, extended automatic caption capability to all English-language videos on the video-sharing website on Thursday.

YouTube users have been able to manually add captions to videos since 2008 and in November of last year the site began offering machine-generated captions for about a dozen partner channels.

Hiroto Tokusei, a YouTube product manager, said in a blog post on Thursday that the automatic caption, or auto-caption, feature was now being expanded to all videos on the site in English. Auto-captioning uses speech-to-text technology to generate subtitles.

"Making video easily accessible is something we're working hard to address at YouTube," said Tokusei, citing studies that predict that over 700 million people worldwide will suffer from hearing impairment by 2015.

Binoculars

Researchers find materials that could lead to super crypto chips

Studies at Florida State University could also lead to smaller storage devices with Exabyte capacity

Researchers at Florida State University have discovered crystals that could lead to super security chips as well as contribute to the discovery of materials that expand the capacity of electronic storage devices by 1,000 to 1 million times.

The security chips could store encrypted data written two different ways -- electrically and magnetically -- making extraction of the data more complex and so more difficult for attackers to decrypt.

If they have success developing a new storage medium, devices the size of a current 1GB storage components could hold an Exabyte -- a million million Bytes -- of data.

UFO

Russian Volga region moves to produce flying saucers

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© locomosky.ru
The government of the Ulianovsk Region in the Volga area has approved a five-year program to produce so-called "flying saucers" - a bizarre hybrid of a helicopter and an aerostat.

The first such aircraft, officially named "aerostatic thermoballasted vehicle" or simply "Locomoskayner" after its manufacturer LocomoSky, was presented MAKS-2009 air show. The prototype flying saucer was seven meters (23 feet) in diameter and was able to transport 20 kg (44.4 lbs) of cargo.

The company, however, plans to produce aircraft with a cargo-carrying capacity of up to 600 metric tons or a passenger capacity of up to 11,000 people.

It will be able to hover, perform a vertical landing, move in a straight line with speeds close to 100 kmph, turn around and will need no special ground-based facilities to land.

Info

Oldest 'writing' found on 60,000-year-old eggshells

Earliest Writing
© Pierre-Jean Texier/Diepkloof ProjectWhat do they say?
Could these lines etched into 60,000-year-old ostrich eggshells (see photo) be the earliest signs of humans using graphic art to communicate?

Until recently, the first consistent evidence of symbolic communication came from the geometric shapes that appear alongside rock art all over the world, which date to 40,000 years ago. Older finds, like the 75,000-year-old engraved ochre chunks from the Blombos cave in South Africa, have mostly been one-offs and difficult to tell apart from meaningless doodles.

The engraved ostrich eggshells may change that. Since 1999, Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux, France, and his colleagues have uncovered 270 fragments of shell at the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape, South Africa.

They show the same symbols are used over and over again, and the team say there are signs that the symbols evolved over 5000 years. This long-term repetition is a hallmark of symbolic communication and a sign of modern human thinking, say the team (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0913047107).

Telescope

First of missing primitive stars discovered

Image
© David A. Aguilar / CfAThe newly discovered red giant star S1020549 dominates this artist's conception. The primitive star contains 6,000 times less heavy elements than our Sun, indicating that it formed very early in the Universe's history. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 290,000 light-years away, the star's presence supports the theory that our galaxy underwent a "cannibal" phase, growing to its current size by swallowing dwarf galaxies and other galactic building blocks.
Astronomers have discovered a relic from the early universe - a star that may have been among the second generation of stars to form after the Big Bang. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 290,000 light-years away, the star has a remarkably similar chemical make-up to the Milky Way's oldest stars. Its presence supports the theory that our galaxy underwent a "cannibal" phase, growing to its current size by swallowing dwarf galaxies and other galactic building blocks.

"This star likely is almost as old as the universe itself," said astronomer Anna Frebel of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of the Nature paper reporting the finding.

Info

'World's Most Useful Tree' Provides Low-Cost Water Purification Method for Developing World

A low-cost water purification technique published in Current Protocols in Microbiology could help drastically reduce the incidence of waterborne disease in the developing world. The procedure, which uses seeds from the Moringa oleifera tree, can produce a 90.00% to 99.99% bacterial reduction in previously untreated water, and has been made free to download as part of access programs under John Wiley & Sons' Corporate Citizenship Initiative.

Info

Researchers Find Weakness in Common Digital Security System

Ann Arbor, Michigan---The most common digital security technique used to protect both media copyright and Internet communications has a major weakness, University of Michigan computer scientists have discovered.

RSA authentication is a popular encryption method used in media players, laptop computers, smartphones, servers and other devices. Retailers and banks also depend on it to ensure the safety of their customers' information online.

The scientists found they could foil the security system by varying the voltage supply to the holder of the "private key," which would be the consumer's device in the case of copy protection and the retailer or bank in the case of Internet communication. It is highly unlikely that a hacker could use this approach on a large institution, the researchers say. These findings would be more likely to concern media companies and mobile device manufacturers, as well as those who use them.