Science & TechnologyS


Black Cat

Domestic Cats Are Real Killers And We've Got Proof

Michael Harper
RedOrbit
Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:14 UTC
Cat
© Photos.com
I can see it in her eyes. Every morning after I wake up and sleepily stumble into my kitchen to pour myself a glass of water or grab some clean clothes from the dryer. After all, who folds clothes anymore?

As I make my way through the house, she lies in wait, crouched in pouncing posture, head poking through the living room blinds just so, keeping an eye out for the squirrels which enjoy a daily breakfast at the dried corn feeder my wife and I placed on our front porch. Sure, there's a sliding glass door separating her from living in all of her primeval and powerful glory, but it doesn't do anything to lessen the intense stare in her eyes. On the surface, she's just a basic, tame house cat, but in her heart, she's a well-trained killing machine.

And she even plays fetch with my spent beer bottle caps.

Anyone who has ever owned a cat knows just how mysterious and perplexing these creatures can be. Anyone who has ever owned a cat which roams the outdoors knows these creatures can be cold blooded killers, laying their kill on your doorstep as either an offering of gratitude or a warning of your impending fate. One can never tell.

While their predatory nature might be well understood by their owners (or is it masters?), some University of Georgia researchers decided to attach cameras to some 60 or more pet cats as they roamed outdoors to see what happens when these creatures are allowed to tap into their primordial instincts.

"The results were certainly surprising, if not startling," said Kerrie Anne Loyd, University of Georgia student and lead author of the KittyCam study, speaking to the Detroit Free Press.
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Question

Something New Going on at The Edge of The Solar System

Jason Major
Universe Today
Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:17 UTC
Heliosphere
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
As the venerable Voyager 1 spacecraft hurtles ever outward, breaking through the very borders of our solar system at staggering speeds upwards of 35,000 mph, it's sending back information about the curious region of space where the Sun's outward flow of energetic particles meets the more intense cosmic radiation beyond - a boundary called the heliosheath.

Voyager 1 has been traveling through this region for the past seven years, all the while its instruments registering gradually increasing levels of cosmic ray particles. But recently the levels have been jumping up and down, indicating something new is going on... perhaps Voyager 1 is finally busting through the breakers of our Sun's cosmic bay into the open ocean of interstellar space?

Data sent from Voyager 1 - a trip that currently takes the information nearly 17 hours to make - have shown steadily increasing levels of cosmic radiation as the spacecraft moves farther from the Sun. But on July 28, the levels of high-energy cosmic particles detected by Voyager jumped by 5 percent, with levels of lower-energy radiation from the Sun dropping by nearly half later the same day. Within three days both levels had returned to their previous states.

The last time such a jump in levels occurred was in May - and that spike took a week to happen.
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Info

Apple Co-Founder sees Trouble Ahead for Cloud Computing

Robert MacPherson
Agence France-Presse
Sun, 05 Aug 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© Torsten Blackwood/AFPApple co-founder Steve Wozniak, seen here in May 2012, has predicted "horrible problems" …
Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs, predicted "horrible problems" in the coming years as cloud-based computing takes hold.

Wozniak, 61, was the star turn at the penultimate performance in Washington of "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," monologist Mike Daisey's controversial two-hour expose of Apple's labor conditions in China.

In a post-performance dialogue with Daisey and audience members, Wozniak held forth on topics as varied as public education (he once did a stint as a school teacher) and reality TV (having appeared on "Dancing with the Stars").

But the engineering wizard behind the progenitor of today's personal computer, the Apple II, was most outspoken on the shift away from hard disks towards uploading data into remote servers, known as cloud computing.

"I really worry about everything going to the cloud," he said. "I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years."
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Attention

Mars Rover Curiosity Marks New Future of Space Program


CBS News
Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© The Associated Press/The Huntsville Times/ Eric SchultzU.S. Space and Rocket Center educators Shannon Lampton and Charlene Pittman cheer at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center as as they watch NASA's Mars Curiosity rover land , on Aug. 6, 2012 in Huntsville, Ala.
Pasadena, California - In a show of technological wizardry, the robotic explorer Curiosity blazed through the pink skies of Mars, steering itself to a gentle landing inside a giant crater for the most ambitious dig yet into the Red Planet's past.

Cheers and applause echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory late Sunday after the most high-tech interplanetary rover ever built signaled it had survived a harrowing plunge through the thin Mars atmosphere.

"Touchdown confirmed," said engineer Allen Chen. "We're safe on Mars."


The extraterrestrial feat injected a much-needed boost to NASA, which is debating whether it can afford another Mars landing this decade. At a budget-busting $2.5 billion, Curiosity is the priciest gamble yet, which scientists and government officials hope will pay off with a bonanza of discoveries.

"We are the only country that has ever done anything like this," boasted John Holdren, the senior advisor to President Obama on science and technology issues, who was in the JPL control room as Curiosity touched down. "Many new technologies had to work in perfect synchronization."
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Arrow Down

Mars Rover Curiosity on Course to Land Monday

Marc Kaufman
The Washington Post
Sat, 04 Aug 2012 03:01 UTC

Pasadena, California - After a journey of 354 million miles, a spacecraft approaching Mars at 13,200 mph is on course to land inside its sweet spot early Monday.

The landing is one of the riskiest ever tried, and the descent is what NASA officials call "seven minutes of terror."

Nonetheless, the spacecraft carrying the Mars rover Curiosity is on target "to fly through the eye of the needle" and touch down within its five-by-13-mile landing elipse, said Arthur Amador, mission manager of the Mars Science Laboratory. "We're . . . in as good shape as we could hope for."

Yet with so much riding on the $2.5 billion mission, he said at a news conference, "we're often reminding each other to keep breathing."

The spaceship is on course to enter the Martian atmosphere at 1:24 a.m. Eastern time on Monday.

Because the rover is so much larger, more complicated and more ambitious than earlier models, it has to land in a new and far more hazardous way. The landing, which could never be tested in full on Earth, includes a hovering rocket stage, a kind of sky crane, to lower it to the ground. NASA's chief scientist John Grunsfeld has said that because of that heightened landing difficulty, in addition to the unprecedented sophistication of the instruments on board, Curiosity is "the most important NASA mission of the decade."
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Meteor

Asteroid storm likely reason for life-giving water that covers Earth

John McPhee
The Chronicle Herald
Sat, 04 Aug 2012 16:23 UTC
Image
© John McPheeA bit of the water that covers 71 per cent of our planet rolls into the beach at Cousins Shore on P.E.I.
I'm bobbing on my back on the second largest body of water in the world.

Beneath me is the gentle push and swell of the Atlantic Ocean, 106 million square kilometres of water that stretches from the Arctic to the boundaries of the Antarctic Ocean.

Few things are more relaxing for me than mucking about in the ocean. But unlike a lake or river, here you're always aware of the huge, powerful entity in which you're immersed. Ocean water feels almost alive, a latent force that could go from playful to unimaginably powerful in the blink of an eye.

Which of course - as Maritime residents are all too aware - it can.

But for now, it's a comforting sensation as I float on the warm, shallow waters off P.E.I.'s north shore.

As a weak swimmer who loves the water, I've grown to appreciate sandbars and there's a doozy here at Cabot Beach Provincial Park.
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Telescope

'Cry' of a Shredded Star Heralds a New Era for Testing Relativity


ScienceDaily
Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:45 UTC
Image
© NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterThis illustration highlights the principal features of Swift J1644+57 and summarizes what astronomers have discovered about it.
Last year, astronomers discovered a quiescent black hole in a distant galaxy that erupted after shredding and consuming a passing star. Now researchers have identified a distinctive X-ray signal observed in the days following the outburst that comes from matter on the verge of falling into the black hole.

This tell-tale signal, called a quasi-periodic oscillation or QPO, is a characteristic feature of the accretion disks that often surround the most compact objects in the universe -- white dwarf stars, neutron stars and black holes. QPOs have been seen in many stellar-mass black holes, and there is tantalizing evidence for them in a few black holes that may have middleweight masses between 100 and 100,000 times the sun's.

Until the new finding, QPOs had been detected around only one supermassive black hole -- the type containing millions of solar masses and located at the centers of galaxies. That object is the Seyfert-type galaxy REJ 1034+396, which at a distance of 576 million light-years lies relatively nearby.

"This discovery extends our reach to the innermost edge of a black hole located billions of light-years away, which is really amazing. This gives us an opportunity to explore the nature of black holes and test Einstein's relativity at a time when the universe was very different than it is today," said Rubens Reis, an Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Reis led the team that uncovered the QPO signal using data from the orbiting Suzaku and XMM-Newton X-ray telescopes, a finding described in a paper published August 2 in Science Express.
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Telescope

Supernova Progenitor Found? New Research Identifies Star System That May Explode


ScienceDaily
Sat, 04 Aug 2012 15:40 UTC
Image
© NASA / CXC / SAO / JPL-Caltech / MPIA / Calar Alto / O. Krause et alA composite X-ray / optical / infrared image of the remnant of Tycho’s star, a type Ia supernova seen in 1572.
Type Ia supernovae are violent stellar explosions. Observations of their brightness are used to determine distances in the universe and have shown scientists that the cosmos is expanding at an accelerating rate. But there is still too little known about the specifics of the processes by which these supernovae form. New research, led by Stella Kafka of the Carnegie Institution for Science in the United States, identifies a star system, prior to explosion, which will possibly become a type Ia supernova.

The work will appear in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The widely accepted theory is that type Ia supernovae are thermonuclear explosions of a white dwarf star that's part of a binary system -- two stars that are physically close and orbit around a common centre of mass. The white dwarf has mass gradually donated to it by its companion. When the white dwarf mass eventually reaches 1.4 times that of the sun, it explodes to produce a type Ia supernova. The crucial questions are: What is the nature of the donor star and how does this white dwarf increase its mass. Also, how would that process affect the properties of the explosion?

With these questions in mind, scientists have been searching for candidate systems that could become type Ia supernovae. There are thousands of possibilities in the candidate pool, none of which have yet been observed to produce an explosion. Recent studies, some of which involved scientists at Carnegie observatories, have identified sodium gas associated with type Ia supernovae. This gas might be ejected from the binary's donor star and linger around the system to be detected after the white dwarf explodes. This provides a clue to the progenitor. Even so, Kafka still compared the search to "looking for a needle in a stellar haystack."
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Bizarro Earth

Even greater risk of massive coastal earthquake, studies find

Randy Boswell
Vancouver Sun
Sat, 04 Aug 2012 15:30 UTC
U.S. scientists studied Cascadia quakes going back 10,000 years and believe that a major quake is likely within 50 years

Two separate geological studies released this week suggest the earth-quake hazard in the transboundary region of the Pacific Coast of North America - including southern British Columbia - is significantly greater than previously believed.

Both teams of U.S. scientists are urging heightened readiness throughout the region for a future offshore "mega-thrust" event that could compare with the one that triggered Japan's earth-quake-tsunami-nuclear catastrophe last year.

In one study - a 13-year comprehensive analysis of the Cascadia earth-quake-prone zone between Vancouver Island and Northern California - a team of researchers concluded the "clock is ticking" ahead of a potentially devastating earthquake in the region within the next 50 years.
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Telescope

Signs Changing Fast for Voyager at Solar System Edge


ScienceDaily
Sat, 04 Aug 2012 15:33 UTC
Image
© NASA/JPL-CaltechThis artist's concept shows NASA's two Voyager spacecraft exploring a turbulent region of space known as the heliosheath, the outer shell of the bubble of charged particles around our sun.
Two of three key signs of changes expected to occur at the boundary of interstellar space have changed faster than at any other time in the last seven years, according to new data from NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft.

For the last seven years, Voyager 1 has been exploring the outer layer of the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself. In one day, on July 28, data from Voyager 1's cosmic ray instrument showed the level of high-energy cosmic rays originating from outside our solar system jumped by five percent. During the last half of that same day, the level of lower-energy particles originating from inside our solar system dropped by half. However, in three days, the levels had recovered to near their previous levels.

A third key sign is the direction of the magnetic field, and scientists are eagerly analyzing the data to see whether that has, indeed, changed direction. Scientists expect that all three of these signs will have changed when Voyager 1 has crossed into interstellar space. A preliminary analysis of the latest magnetic field data is expected to be available in the next month.
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