Science & TechnologyS


Bizarro Earth

Study reveals earthquake dangers in Spain


OurAmazingPlanet
Mon, 12 Nov 2012 17:30 UTC
Spain Earthquake
© Antonio Periago MiñarroThe Church of Santiago de Lorca, destroyed by a 5.1 magnitude earthquake on May 11, 2011. A study suggests large earthquakes have occurred in southeast Spain more often than thought.
At least six earthquakes registering above a seven on the Richter scale struck a little-known Spanish fault in the recent past, according to new research.

The finding suggests that the fault, in Southeast Spain, is more active than previously thought and could pose a potential hazard to people living in the region, according to the study, published in the Geological Society of America Bulletin in October.

The study also found that the fault has given rise to unusual earthquakes. "During earthquakes, the entire length of the fault does not break," said Jose J. Martínez Díaz, a study co-author and researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, in a statement. "It does so in segments." These ruptures could give rise to larger earthquakes than previously thought.

"This fault has already produced an earthquake of magnitude 6.5 or 7, thousands of years ago, and could do so again tomorrow," Martínez Díaz said. "As a result, it is vital to bear in mind the earthquake-risk calculations and building codes on the area."
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Info

Guys, your Y chromosome is an evolutionary marvel

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Mon, 12 Nov 2012 12:41 UTC
Chris Hemsworth
© Featureflash | Shutterstock.comThe evolution of the Y chromosome suggests that human history was less polygamous than previously thought. (Australian actor Chris Hemsworth best known for playing Thor in the Marvel movie of the same name.)
San Francisco - The Y chromosome may have gotten a bad rap. Despite the claim that this male sex chromosome is mostly junk, new research suggests it's actually a lean, mean, highly evolved machine for producing the fittest males possible.

The findings, presented Friday (Nov. 9) here at the American Society of Human Genetics' annual meeting, dispute the notion that historically most men in a generation have not passed on their genes while a few lucky guys fathered hordes of children.

"Averaged over many hundreds of thousands of years, there's likely been a small skew in the number of males to females," said Melissa Wilson Sayres, a researcher at the University of California Berkeley. "There is some skew, but it's not very large."

Fewer alpha males?

Every cell in the human body contains 23 pairs of chromosomes (threadlike structures into which DNA is packed), with one of those pairs comprising the sex chromosomes (an X and Y for males and XX for females). The DNA in the Y chromosome represents about 2 percent of the DNA in human's cells, compared with the X chromosome's 5 percent.

The Y chromosome also has much less variation in its DNA than other types of DNA, meaning that the sex chromosomes in two men will look more alike than other chromosomes do.

Some scientists have argued the Y chromosome is so uniform because throughout evolution, relatively few men passed on their genes compared with women - in other words, alpha males hogged all the women, while less successful men lost out in the mating game. That would mean that modern-day people have far fewer male ancestors than female ones. But nobody had looked to see if that theory jibed with the genetic makeup of the Y chromosome.
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Powertool

Researchers find undersea gas leaks off Israel's coast


PhysOrg.com
Mon, 12 Nov 2012 12:23 UTC
Image
The terms "gas" and "sea" for many will invoke associations of reserves, business, and a lot of money. Whatever the association, most of the efforts in Israel's energy field are being directed at gas buried deep under the Mediterranean seabed. Now a new geophysical study, the first of its kind in Israel, has uncovered a system of active gas springs in the Haifa Bay seabed, at relatively shallow depths, only a few dozen meters below the surface.

The study, published in the journal Continental Shelf Research, describes the entire system, from its sources under the sea floor through the natural springs emerging from the seabed. "This is a natural laboratory for researching gas emissions from the sea floor - natural springs and less natural ones. We are only beginning to understand their contribution to climate and ecological change," said Dr. Uri Schattner of the Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences at the University of Haifa, who led the research.

The first evidence of gas springs emerged from examining a map of the sea floor off Israel's northern coast. A joint effort between the University of Haifa and the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research Institute revealed no less than 700 spots in the seabed that looked like possible gas springs. The researchers' suspicions intensified when seismic data identified pockets of gas beneath the seabed.
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Info

Are humans becoming less intelligent?

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Mon, 12 Nov 2012 11:14 UTC
Brain biology
© Inconnu
Humans may be gradually losing intelligence, according to a new study.

The study, published today (Nov. 12) in the journal Trends in Genetics, argues that humans lost the evolutionary pressure to be smart once we started living in dense agricultural settlements several thousand years ago.

"The development of our intellectual abilities and the optimization of thousands of intelligence genes probably occurred in relatively non-verbal, dispersed groups of peoples [living] before our ancestors emerged from Africa," said study author Gerald Crabtree, a researcher at Stanford University, in a statement.

Since then it's all been downhill, Crabtree contends.

The theory isn't without critics, with one scientist contacted by LiveScience suggesting that rather than losing our smarts, humans have just diversified them with various types of intelligence today.
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Info

Self-healing plastic 'skin' points way to new prosthetics

Tim Wogan
ScienceNow
Sun, 11 Nov 2012 12:00 UTC
Plastic Skin
© Benjamin Tee and Chao WangCutting edge. After it was divided with a scalpel, a new polymer was able to heal itself, restoring most of its mechanical and electrical properties in 15 seconds.
Human skin is a special material: It needs to be flexible, so that it doesn't crack every time a user clenches his fist. It needs to be sensitive to stimuli like touch and pressure - which are measured as electrical signals, so it needs to conduct electricity.

Crucially, if it's to survive the wear and tear it's put through every day, it needs to be able to repair itself. Now, researchers in California may have designed a synthetic version - a flexible, electrically conductive, self-healing polymer.

The result is part of a decadelong miniboom in "epidermal electronics" - the production of circuits thin and flexible enough to be attached to skin (for use as wearable heart rate monitors, for example) or to provide skinlike touch sensitivity to prosthetic limbs.

The problem is that silicon, the base material of the electronics industry, is brittle. So various research groups have investigated different ways to produce flexible electronic sensors.

Chemists, meanwhile, have become increasingly interested in "self-healing" polymers. This sounds like science fiction, but several research groups have produced plastics that can join their cut edges together when scientists heat them, shine a light on them, or even just hold the cut edges together.

In 2008, researchers at ESPCI ParisTech showed that a specially designed rubber compound could recover its mechanical properties after being broken and healed repeatedly.
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Fireball

The Raging Comet Storm of Star System Eta Corvi


The Daily Galaxy
Sat, 10 Nov 2012 08:47 UTC
In 2011, the infrared detectors of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected indications that one or more comets was torn to shreds after colliding with a rocky body in an alien solar system in a manner similar to what happened to our own solar system several billion years ago during a period known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment," which may have brought water and other life-forming ingredients to Earth.
Image
© NASA/JPL-Caltech and revolutionizingawareness.com
Spitzer spotted a band of dust around a nearby bright star in the northern sky called Eta Corvi that strongly matches the contents of an obliterated giant comet. This dust is located close enough to Eta Corvi that Earth-like worlds could exist, suggesting a collision took place between a planet and one or more comets. The Eta Corvi system is approximately one billion years old, which researchers think is about the right age for such a hailstorm. "We believe we have direct evidence for an ongoing Late Heavy Bombardment in the nearby star system Eta Corvi, occurring about the same time as in our solar system," said Carey Lisse, senior research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Astronomers used Spitzer's infrared detectors to analyze the light coming from the dust around Eta Corvi. Certain chemical fingerprints were observed, including water ice, organics and rock, which indicate a giant comet source.
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Comet

Comet Hergenrother breaks apart before astronomers' eyes


Space.com
Sat, 10 Nov 2012 11:43 UTC
Image
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/GeminiThis image of Comet Hergenrother, taken by the Gemini telescope on Nov. 2, 2012, shows several distinct pieces near the comet's core.
A comet is falling apart on its trek through the inner solar system, and astronomers have a ringside seat for all the dramatic action.

Amateur and professional astronomers have been following Comet Hergenrother for several weeks, noting some impressive outbursts of comet dust as it passed through our neck of the cosmic woods. Now it appears that the icy wanderer's days may be numbered.

"Comet Hergenrother is splitting apart," Rachel Stevenson, a post-doctoral fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. "Using the Gemini North Telescope on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, we have resolved that the nucleus of the comet has separated into at least four distinct pieces, resulting in a large increase in dust material in its coma."
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Galaxy

Comet collisions every 6 seconds unlock 17-year-old stellar mystery


Zeenews.com
Sat, 10 Nov 2012 07:05 UTC
Image
Comets have been colliding with one another every six seconds for millions of years near a star in the constellation Cetus called 49 CETI, which is visible to the naked eye.

Over the past three decades, astronomers have discovered hundreds of dusty disks around stars, but only two - 49 CETI is one - have been found that also have large amounts of gas orbiting them.

Young stars, about a million years old, have a disk of both dust and gas orbiting them, but the gas tends to dissipate within a few million years and almost always within about 10 million years.

Yet 49 CETI, which is thought to be considerably older, is still being orbited by a tremendous quantity of gas in the form of carbon monoxide molecules, long after that gas should have dissipated.
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Propaganda

Space propaganda: Obama win keeps NASA on course - toward an asteroid

Mike Wall
LiveScience
Thu, 08 Nov 2012 06:42 UTC
Image
Life imitating art: Is that Obama keeping NASA on course towards an asteroid... or keeping the whole planet on course toward an asteroid?
President Barack Obama's re-election Tuesday night (Nov. 6) means NASA will likely continue along its current path, working to get astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 among other goals.

A change of course for the space agency was possible had Mitt Romney won the presidency, as the Republican candidate pledged to reassess NASA's path forward. But we'll never know what a Romney-revised path may have looked like, for President Obama won the day.

Here's a brief look at some of NASA's larger aims and ambitions, which it should continue to work toward over at least the next four years.
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Question

Strange hourglass-shaped object in Kuiper Belt


The Daily Galaxy
Fri, 09 Nov 2012 23:32 UTC
Object in Kuiper Belt
© The Daily Galaxy
The bizarre, hourglass-shaped Kuiper belt object 2001QG298 spins round like a propeller as it orbits the Sun, according to an astronomer from Queens University Belfast. The discovery that the spinning object is tilted at nearly 90 degrees to the ecliptic plane was surprising, and suggests that this type of object could be very common in the Kuiper belt.

The Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) orbit the sun beyond Neptune and are the best preserved leftovers of the formation of the planets. 2001QG298 is a remarkable KBO made up from two components that orbit each other very closely, possibly touching. "Imagine that you glue two eggs together tip to tip - that's approximately the shape of 2001QG298. It looks a bit like an hourglass," said Dr Pedro Lacerda at the Joint Meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the Division for Planetary Sciences in Nantes, France.

The strange shape of 2001QG298 was uncovered by Dr Scott Sheppard and Prof David Jewitt in 2004. They noticed that 2001QG298's apparent brightness periodically tripled every 7 hours or so.

"The object is so distant that we cannot resolve its shape. But this brightness oscillation, called a lightcurve, reveals the strange shape of 2001QG298 as it spins round. The object appears faint at times because one lobe is hidden behind the other, so less area is reflecting sunlight. As the hidden component rotates back into view, we can see the full hour-glass shape. The reflecting area increases and the whole thing looks brighter," explains Lacerda.
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