Science & TechnologyS


Comet 2

NEOWISE spies its first comet, C/2014 C3 (NEOWISE)


JPL NASA
Fri, 28 Feb 2014 16:23 UTC
Comet C2014 C3 (NEOWISE)
© JPL NASAComet NEOWISE was first observed by NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) spacecraft on Valentine's Day, 2014.
NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) spacecraft has spotted a never-before-seen comet -- its first such discovery since coming out of hibernation late last year.

"We are so pleased to have discovered this frozen visitor from the outermost reaches of our solar system," said Amy Mainzer, the mission's principal investigator from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "This comet is a weirdo - it is in a retrograde orbit, meaning that it orbits the sun in the opposite sense from Earth and the other planets."

Officially named "C/2014 C3 (NEOWISE)", the first comet discovery of the renewed mission came on Feb. 14 when the comet was about 143 million miles (230 million kilometers) from Earth. Although the comet's orbit is still a bit uncertain, it appears to have arrived from its most distant point in the region of the outer planets. The mission's sophisticated software picked out the moving object against a background of stationary stars. As NEOWISE circled Earth, scanning the sky, it observed the comet six times over half a day before the object moved out of its view.
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Magic Wand

Mysterious flashing 'Earthquake Lights' maybe explained?

Charles Q. Choi
Live Science
Thu, 27 Feb 2014 13:15 UTC
Image
A false color snapshot of cracks in a sheared powder bed above a typical voltage signal. Whenever a crack opens, the voltage drops by about 100 volts.
Mysterious flashes of lightning sometimes herald earthquakes, and now scientists may have discovered why: Shifting grains surrounding faults in the Earth may generate an electric charge.

This strange flickering, known as earthquake lights, can occur before or during quakes. Recent findings suggest earthquake lights seem to happen at rifts where pieces of the Earth are pulling apart from each other.

Normal lightning results from the buildup of electrical charge in clouds. However, lab experiments now suggest earthquake lights may instead originate from the buildup of electrical charge in the ground surrounding geological faults.

'Improbable' effects

Applied physicist Troy Shinbrot, of Rutgers University in New Jersey, and his colleagues looked at three different kinds of particles - plastic disks, glass particles and organic powders, such as flour - that stick and slip in much the same way the Earth does in earthquake zones. He and his colleagues studyelectric charge in powders, which, for example, can make pharmaceutical mixtures separate or stick to surfaces in unwanted ways in factories.
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Brick Wall

Tornado alley: Can giant walls protect the U.S.?

Doyle Rice
USA Today
Wed, 26 Feb 2014 09:45 UTC
Image
© Storm Prediction CenterTornado Alley is located in the Plains states from the Dakotas to Texas.
The walls would need to be about 1,000 feet high and 150 feet wide

One scientist thinks we can protect parts of the central USA from ferocious tornadoes by building several gigantic walls across Tornado Alley:

"If we build three east-west great walls in the American Midwest .... one in North Dakota, one along the border between Kansas and Oklahoma to the east, and the third one in south Texas and Louisiana, we will diminish the tornado threats in the Tornado Alley forever," according to physicist Rongjia Tao of Temple University.

The walls would need to be about 1,000 feet high and 150 feet wide, he said. Tao is presenting his research next week at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver.

He said that major tornadoes in Tornado Alley are created from the violent clashes between the northbound warm air flow and southbound cold air flow. He adds that because there are no west-to-east mountains in Tornado Alley to weaken the air flow, collisions between warm and cold air create turbulence and supercells that spawn tornadoes.

Tornado Alley is generally defined as the Plains states from the Dakotas to Texas.
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Attention

Physicists plan to wipe out Earth's Van Allen belts with radio waves

Graham Templeton
Geek
Thu, 27 Feb 2014 08:30 UTC
Van Allen Belt
© Geek.com
It was just last year that physicists thought they found the origin of Earth's Van Allen radiation belts - and now a prominent group of them want those belts dead! It's understandable, given the frustration these areas of space can cause to modern astrophysicists; if you want to launch a satellite or telescope, let alone a human being, the Van Allen belts will be a painful thorn in your side.

So, says a growing group of astrophysicists, why not wipe them out altogether? It might seem odd to hear scientists propose destroying a feature of the natural world, but there is a decent scientific argument to be made that these belts provide us nothing useful, and that we could lose them without a single negative effect.

The Van Allen belts are huge, dual-lobed areas of space around the Earth which are filled with high-velocity charged particles - electrons and protons whipping around the planet at near-relativistic speeds. For years it was thought that we had two distinct belts - but just recently that was updated to three. The belts, we now know, are caused by Earth's own magnetic field, which acts like a huge particle accelerator to ramp these ions up to dangerous speeds.

Apollo astronauts were guinea-pigs in figuring out the human effects of traveling through the Van Allen belts - but we now know they're mostly dangerous to electrical equipment. The belts pulse and morph with the changing of the seasons, and a manned mission can usually get through with only a minimal increase in radiation exposure.
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Saturn

The count keeps rising: 715 new planets discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope


The Guardian
Wed, 26 Feb 2014 12:02 UTC
discovered planets
© CorbisFour of the newly-discovered planets were two and a half times the size of Earth.
Kepler space telescope's discoveries include four planets that could hold liquid surface water, believed to be key for life

Scientists added a record 715 more planets to the list of known worlds beyond the solar system, boosting the overall tally to nearly 1,700, astronomers said on Wednesday.

The additions include four planets about two and a half times as big as Earth that are the right distance from their parent stars for liquid surface water, which is believed to be key for life.

The discoveries were made with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope before it was sidelined by a pointing system problem last year. The telescope, launched in 2009, spent four productive years staring at 160,000 target stars for signs of planets passing by, relative to the telescope's line of sight.

The tally of planets announced at a Nasa press conference on Wednesday boosted Kepler's confirmed planet count from 246 to 961.

Combined with other telescopes' results, the headcount of planets beyond the solar system, or exoplanets, now numbers nearly 1,700.

"We almost doubled, just today, the number of planets known to humanity," astronomer Douglas Hudgins, head of exoplanet exploration at Nasa headquarters in Washington, told reporters on a conference call.

The population boom is due to a new verification technique that analyses potential planets in batches rather than one at a time. The method was developed after scientists realised that most planets, like those in the solar system, have sibling worlds orbiting a common parent star.
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Fish

End-Permian mass extinction: Earth's greatest extinction hardly changed ocean ways of life

Charles Q. Choi
Yahoo! News
Sun, 23 Feb 2014 17:14 UTC
Gastropods
© UnknownGastropods (snails) (Coelostylina werfensis and ‘Polygyrina’ gracilior) from the Early Triassic representing slow-moving, epifaunal grazers.
Earth's largest mass extinction had surprisingly little effect on the range of lifestyles seen on the planet's seafloor, despite the loss of more than 90 percent of marine species, researchers find.

Understanding the impacts of this ancient extinction event may shed light on the damage climate change might now inflict on the planet, the scientists say.

The end-Permian mass extinction, which occurred 252 million years ago, was the biggest die-off in the planet's history, and the largest of the five mass extinctions seen in the fossil record. The cataclysm killed as much as 95 percent of all species on Earth.

Mass extinctions are often followed by an explosion in diversity, as survivors evolve to fill the niches or roles that dead groups of life once held in their communities. For instance, after the end-Permian die-off, the predecessors of modern burrowing clams, grazing and carnivorous snails, and predatory crustaceans emerged.
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Einstein

Einstein's lost theory uncovered

Davide Castelvecchi
Nature
Mon, 24 Feb 2014 21:12 UTC
Albert Einstein
© California Institute of Technology ArchivesAlbert Einstein at Mount Wilson Observatory in 1931, with Edwin Hubble (centre) and Walter Adams.

A manuscript that lay unnoticed by scientists for decades has revealed that Albert Einstein once dabbled with an alternative to what we now know as the Big Bang theory, proposing instead that the Universe expanded steadily and eternally. The recently uncovered work, written in 1931, is reminiscent of a theory championed by British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle nearly 20 years later. Einstein soon abandoned the idea, but the manuscript reveals his continued hesitance to accept that the Universe was created during a single explosive event.

Evidence for the Big Bang first emerged in the 1920s, when US astronomer Edwin Hubble and others discovered that distant galaxies are moving away and that space itself is expanding. This seemed to imply that, in the past, the contents of the observable Universe had been a very dense and hot 'primordial broth'.

But, from the late 1940s, Hoyle argued that space could be expanding eternally and keeping a roughly constant density. It could do this by continually adding new matter, with elementary particles spontaneously popping up from space, Hoyle said. Particles would then coalesce to form galaxies and stars, and these would appear at just the right rate to take up the extra room created by the expansion of space. Hoyle's Universe was always infinite, so its size did not change as it expanded. It was in a 'steady state'.

The newly uncovered document shows that Einstein had described essentially the same idea much earlier. "For the density to remain constant new particles of matter must be continually formed," he writes. The manuscript is thought to have been produced during a trip to California in 1931 - in part because it was written on American note paper.
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Bug

First contagious WiFi computer virus goes airborne, spreads like the common cold

Giuseppe Macri
The Daily Caller
Tue, 25 Feb 2014 16:47 UTC
Image
© Daily Caller
Computer science researchers have demonstrated for the first time how a digital virus can go airborne and spread via WiFi networks in populated areas at the same pace as a human diseases.

The "Chameleon" virus, designed by a University of Liverpool team, showed a remarkable amount of intelligence by avoiding detection and breaking into personal and business WiFi networks at their weakest points - spreading at an alarming rate.

Network Security Professor Alan Marshall said the virus doesn't try to damage or disrupt established networks - instead, the virus slips in unnoticed to collect the data and log-in information of all users connected to the network via WiFi, and seeks other WiFi networks through them - a much more subtle, sinister and dangerous objective.

"WiFi connections are increasingly a target for computer hackers because of well-documented security vulnerabilities, which make it difficult to detect and defend against a virus," Marshall said in a ScienceBlog report. "It was assumed, however, that it wasn't possible to develop a virus that could attack WiFi networks - but we demonstrated that this is possible and that it can spread quickly."
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Cow Skull

Smithsonian scientists solve 'sudden death at sea' mystery

John Gibbons
Smithsonian
Wed, 26 Feb 2014 09:13 UTC
Image
© SmithsonianFrom left to right, this photo shows Adam Metallo and Vince Rossi from the Smithsonian's Digitization Program Office 3-D Lab using a high-resolution laser arm and medium-range laser scanners to document one of the most complete fossil whales from the Cerro Ballena site. In the background, Smithsonian paleontologist Nick Pyenson reviews data on his laptop while the group works at night in a temporary tent next to the Pan-American Highway in the Atacama Region of Chile in 2011.
Clues unearthed in an ancient whale graveyard.

Mass strandings of whales have puzzled people since Aristotle. Modern-day strandings can be investigated and their causes, often human-related, identified. Events that happened millions of years ago, however, are far harder to analyze - frequently leaving their cause a mystery. A team of Smithsonian and Chilean scientists examined a large fossil site of ancient marine mammal skeletons in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile - the first definitive example of repeated mass strandings of marine mammals in the fossil record. The site reflected four distinct strandings over time, indicating a repeated and similar cause: toxic algae. The team's findings will be published Feb. 26 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The site was first discovered during an expansion project of the Pan-American Highway in 2010. The following year, paleontologists from the Smithsonian and Chile examined the fossils, dating 6-9 million years ago, and recorded what remained before the site was paved over.

The team documented the remains of 10 kinds of marine vertebrates from the site, named Cerro Ballena - Spanish for "whale hill." In addition to the skeletons of the more than 40 large baleen whales that dominated the site, the team documented the remains of a species of sperm whale and a walrus-like whale, both of which are now extinct. They also found skeletons of billfishes, seals and aquatic sloths.
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Cell Phone

Boeing is making a spy phone that self-destructs

Nick Stockton
Quartz
Wed, 26 Feb 2014 12:52 UTC
Black Phone
© Reuters/Adrees Latif Threaten it all you want, Boeing's new phone won't crack.

Boeing has filed papers with the FCC to develop a smartphone for people in the business of secrets. The phone, simply called "Black," will run an Android-variant operating system, be compatible with other technology, and - like any good spy phone - will self-destruct if you try to figure out its secrets.

This filing comes two years after the original news leaked that the company was working on the smartphone, which will support all the world's major communications (GSM, LTE, and WCDMA), storage (USB, HDMI, SIM), and wireless (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi) standards.

What it won't support is any snooping, journalistic or otherwise. Boeing is claiming that its hardware specs are exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests because they contains "trade secrets" and are vital to national security.

Anyone who is issued a Boeing Black will have to agree in a non-disclosure agreement to stay mum about the phone's hardware, software, performance, applications, and anything else Boeing decides is "proprietary information."
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