Science & TechnologyS


Frog

Frogspawn in trees? How does that happen?


WildLife Extra
Wed, 06 Feb 2013 17:30 UTC
Frogspawn
© Wildlife ExtraWorking Wetlands staff were surprised to find this frogspawn in a tree high above the ground.
What leaves frog spawn six foot up a tree? There is a rational answer, and it doesn't involve a new breed of super-frog!

Staff at Devon Wildlife Trust's Working Wetlands project recently made a surprise discovery when working on land near Roadford Lake, in north Devon. They were quickly able to identify the jelly-like substance as frog spawn but weren't able to fathom how it had come to be on a tree trunk.

Project Manager Mark Elliott picks up the story: 'Finding frogspawn at this time in winter is not that unusual, especially the mild weather of the past week. But finding it up in a tree was. It's not something I'd come across before. Common frogs lay their spawn in water and it's there that tadpoles develop. Not in trees!'
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Fireball 5

Asteroid 'cruise ship' to miss Earth Feb. 15

Ian O'Neill
Discovery News
Wed, 06 Feb 2013 16:56 UTC
Image
© NASA
Next week, a 45 meter-wide space rock will zoom safely by. But as far as cosmic distances go, it will be a close shave.

Asteroid 2012 DA14 will make close approach on Feb. 15, flying closer than geosynchronous orbit (27,700 kilometers or 17,200 miles or 1/13th the Earth-moon distance). So unless you're a communications satellite, you have nothing to fear. But even if you were a communications satellite, it's unlikely you'd get swatted by the asteroid juggernaut as space is really, really big.

"NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office can accurately predict the asteroid's path with the observations obtained, and it is therefore known that there is no chance that the asteroid might be on a collision course with Earth," asteroid hunters at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., announced on Feb. 1. 2012 DA14 was discovered in February 2012 by the La Sagra Sky Survey in Spain, so its orbital trajectory is very well known.

But the rock will come close enough to Earth's gravitational well so its orbit will be dramatically modified - after its near-Earth encounter, asteroid 2012 DA14′s orbital period around the sun will be shortened from 368 to 317 days.
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Pi

Does probability come from quantum physics?


UC Davis
Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:03 UTC
Ever since Austrian scientist Erwin Schrodinger put his unfortunate cat in a box, his fellow physicists have been using something called quantum theory to explain and understand the nature of waves and particles.

But a new paper by physics professor Andreas Albrecht and graduate student Dan Phillips at the University of California, Davis, makes the case that these quantum fluctuations actually are responsible for the probability of all actions, with far-reaching implications for theories of the universe.

Quantum theory is a branch of theoretical physics that strives to understand and predict the properties and behavior of atoms and particles. Without it, we would not be able to build transistors and computers, for example. One aspect of the theory is that the precise properties of a particle are not determined until you observe them and "collapse the wave function" in physics parlance.

Schrodinger's famous thought experiment extends this idea to our scale. A cat is trapped in a box with a vial of poison that is released when a radioactive atom randomly decays. You cannot tell if the cat is alive or dead without opening the box. Schrodinger argued that until you open the box and look inside, the cat is neither alive nor dead but in an indeterminate state.
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Comet 2

Are we doomed if an asteroid hits Earth?

Tom Tangney
mynorthwest.com
Wed, 06 Feb 2013 12:55 UTC
Image
© Image courtesy NASA/Space.comA week from Friday, a 150-foot-long asteroid, dubbed 2012 DA 14, will pass within 17,000 miles from planet Earth. Now that may not sound like a close shave but that's only 1/13th the way to the moon, so all things considered, that's pretty close.
A giant asteroid is hurtling straight for earth - that's the premise of many a Hollywood script. But for a while recently, scientists thought that could be happening for real.

A week from Friday, a 150-foot-long asteroid, dubbed 2012 DA 14, will pass within 17,000 miles from planet Earth. Now that may not sound like a close shave but that's only 1/13th the way to the moon, so all things considered, that's pretty close.

That got the Luke Burbank Show thinking - what would we or could we do in the case of an asteroid heading our way.

"Scientists have a lot of ideas about what they might do. I mean the problem is none of them have really been tested in the real world," said Clare Moscowitz from Space.com. "The leading idea is to launch a space craft to actually slam into the asteroid. The thinking is, if you can kick it just a little bit off course, you can probably kick it so it won't hit the earth because a small change in it's orbit will put it in a little different trajectory."
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Eye 1

All British dogs will now be microchipped, the Government says

Peter Dominiczak
The Telegraph
Tue, 05 Feb 2013 07:30 UTC
dog
© Geoff PughThe number of patients treated in hospital for dog bites has more than doubled in a decade to more than 6,000 a year
Ministers will say that compulsory microchipping will ensure that all dogs can in future be traced back to their owners, who will then be held accountable for the animal's behaviour.

There have been growing calls for the Government to take action amid concern from animal charities about dangerous dogs being used as weapons and status symbols.

Under the measures to be unveiled by Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary, dog owners will also now face prosecution if an animal attacks anyone in their home.

Those plans will be welcomed by postmen, who have campaigned for a new law ensuring that dog owners are prosecuted even if their dog attacks someone on private property.
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Eye 1

FDA on the verge of approving first bionic eye for the blind


Raw Story
Wed, 06 Feb 2013 11:11 UTC
Image
© AFP Photo
After years of research, the first bionic eye has seen the light of day in the United States, giving hope to the blind around the world.

Developed by Second Sight Medical Products, the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System has helped more than sixty people recover partial sight, with some experiencing better results than others.

Consisting of 60 electrodes implanted in the retina and glasses fitted with a special mini camera, Argus II has already won the approval of European regulators. The US Food and Drug Administration is soon expected to follow suit, making this bionic eye the world's first to become widely available.

"It's the first bionic eye to go on the market in the world, the first in Europe and the first one in the US," said Brian Mech, the California-based company's vice president of business development.
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Bulb

Study: Moles sniff in stereo to locate food underground


Raw Story
Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:39 UTC
Image
© AFP Photo
Moles need both nostrils to locate food underground, in the way that humans see and hear in stereo, according to research reported on Tuesday.

The common mole (Scalopus aquaticus) has tiny eyes tucked between fur and skin and is nearly blind, with small ears attuned only to low frequency sounds.

Curious to understand how the little creature finds food in the dark, biologist Kenneth Catania at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, created a plexiglass chamber in his lab.

The box had 15 holes arranged in a semi-circle in the floor, a different one of which was randomly filled with a tempting piece of earthworm.
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Info

Enigmatic "ribbon" of energy discovered by NASA satellite explained

Klaus Schmidt
Space Fellowship
Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:37 UTC
Ribbon
© Adler Planetarium/IBEX Team. A three-dimensional diagram of the retention region shown as a "life preserver" around our heliosphere bubble along with the original IBEX ribbon image. The interstellar magnetic field lines are shown running from upper left to lower right around the heliosphere, and the area where the field lines "squeeze" the heliosphere corresponds to the ribbon location. The red arrow at the front shows the direction of travel of our solar system.
Durham, New Hampshire - After three years of puzzling over a striking "ribbon" of energy and particles discovered by NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) at the edge of our solar system, scientists may be on the verge of cracking the mystery.

In a paper published Feb. 4, 2013, in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers, including lead author Nathan Schwadron of the University of New Hampshire, propose a "retention theory" that for the first time explains all the key observations of this astrophysical enigma.

"If the theory is correct," Schwadron notes, "the ribbon can be used to tell us how we're moving through the magnetic fields of the interstellar medium and how those magnetic fields then influence our space environment."

In particular, these strong magnetic fields appear to play a critical role in shaping our heliosphere - the huge bubble that surrounds our solar system and shields us from much of harmful galactic cosmic radiation that fills the galaxy.

This may have important ramifications for the history and future of radiation in space, and its impact here on Earth, as the heliosphere changes in response to changing conditions in the interstellar medium or the "space between the stars."

According to the retention theory, the ribbon exists in a special location where neutral hydrogen atoms from the solar wind move across the local galactic magnetic field.

Neutral atoms are not affected by magnetic fields, but when their electrons get stripped away they become charged ions and begin to gyrate rapidly around magnetic field lines.

That rapid rotation creates waves or vibrations in the magnetic field, and the charged ions then become trapped by the waves.This is the process that creates the ribbon.
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Robot

Rise of the droids: Will robots eventually steal all of our jobs?

Michael Snyder
Activist Post
Tue, 05 Feb 2013 13:06 UTC
robot hands
© ezinemark.comRobots taking our jobs?
Will a robot take your job? We have entered a period in human history when technology is advancing at an exponential rate. In some ways, this has been a great blessing for humanity. For example, I am absolutely blown away by all of the things that my little iPod can do. But on the other hand, all of this technology is eliminating millions upon millions of high paying jobs.

In the past, I have written extensively about how millions of American jobs have been sent to the other side of the world, but now we may be moving into a time when workers all over the planet will be steadily losing jobs to super-efficient robots. For employers, robots provide a lot of advantages to human workers. Robots never complain, they never get tired, they never need vacation, they never show up late, they never waste time of Facebook, they don't need any health benefits and there are a whole lot of rules, regulations and taxes that you must deal with when you hire a human worker.

In the past, robots were exceedingly expensive, and that limited their usefulness in the workplace, but as you will see later in this article that is rapidly changing. As robots continue to become even more advanced and even less expensive, will there eventually come a point where the "human worker" is virtually obsolete?
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Better Earth

Mariner 10's first close-up portrait of Venus


NASA.gov
Tue, 05 Feb 2013 12:36 UTC
On Feb. 5, 1974, Mariner 10 took this first close-up photo of Venus. Made using an ultraviolet filter in its imaging system, the photo has been color-enhanced to bring out Venus's cloudy atmosphere as the human eye would see it. Venus is perpetually blanketed by a thick veil of clouds high in carbon dioxide and its surface temperature approaches 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
Image
© NASA
Launched on Nov. 3, 1973 atop an Atlas-Centaur rocket, Mariner 10 flew by Venus in 1974.
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