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Artificial Universe Created Inside a Supercomputer

Charles Q. Choi
SPACE.com
Tue, 28 Aug 2012 13:50 UTC
Arepo Animation
© CfA/UCSD/HITS/M. Vogelsberger (CfA) & V. Springel (HITS)This still frame is taken from the Arepo-generated animation shown above. It demonstrates Arepo's key ability to produce realistic spiral galaxies.
Building a universe from scratch that brims with galaxies resembling those around us is now possible on supercomputers for the first time, researchers say.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a spiral galaxy with a broad disk and outstretched arms, as are many in our cosmic neighborhood, such as Andromeda, the Pinwheel and the Whirlpool galaxies. Spiral galaxies are common, but past computer models that aimed to accurately simulate the birth and evolution of the universe over billions of years had trouble creating them. Instead, they often generated lots of blobby galaxies clumped into balls.

New computer simulations can now recreate the kind of galactic communities seen in our universe, starting with the observed afterglow of the Big Bang and evolving forward in time. Harvard's Odyssey supercomputer allowed simulations that compressed nearly 14 billion years into only a few months.

"We've created the full variety of galaxies we see in the local universe," said study author Mark Vogelsberger at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The new software is called Arepo and was created by Volker Springel at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies in Germany. Previous simulations divided space into a fixed grid of cubes, with each cube simulating the behavior of substances within that space.
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Scientists' Photos Reveal Their Inner Mr. Spock

John Bohannon
ScienceNow
Tue, 28 Aug 2012 12:35 UTC
Spot The Scientist
© ScienceNowSpot the scientist. A study of university home pages finds that scientists tend to present their right cheeks, while arts and humanities scholars tend to show their left.
If you ever wanted proof that scientists are emotionally reserved, just take a look at their faculty pictures. A study of the photos of thousands of academics on university home pages reveals an apparent bias in the way that researchers present themselves to the world: They are more likely than their arts and humanities colleagues to present their right cheeks to the camera, rather than their left. The study suggests that could indicate a desire on the scientists' part to project cool-headed rationality.

Emotions flickering across the face do seem to have a leftward bias. In his 1872 study of the muscular control of smiles and frowns, Charles Darwin found that facial expression tends to begin with the muscles on the left side of the face; the final, overall emotional expression also tends to be accentuated on the left side, he noted. Neuroscientists investigating the asymmetry of facial expression now know that the left side of the face is controlled by nerves that originate from the right side of the brain, where facial expressions are processed. So the left-sided bias makes sense strictly from a wiring point of view.

And there is some evidence to suggest that people are in some way aware of this facial expression asymmetry when sitting for a photograph. A 1973 Nature study showed that people tend to present the left side of their face when posing for a portrait, and that the bias is even more pronounced in women than in men.

Left- versus right-facing photographs also seem to affect perceptions of the photographic subjects. In a 2010 paper published in the journal Laterality, study participants were more likely to guess that photographic subjects were scientists if the photographs showed their right cheeks, and more likely to place them in the arts and humanities if the photos showed their left cheeks. The reason, it was proposed, is that right-sided expressions are associated with logic and a lack of emotion.
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Igloo

Diver's photographs reveal the brilliant colours of the lion's mane jellyfish underneath Russia's arctic sea ice


Daily Mail, UK
Tue, 28 Aug 2012 04:29 UTC
Image
It is a freezing landscape of ice and snow.

But venture a few metres under the surface, as diver and photographer Alexander Semenov did, and you enter the dream-like world of translucent 'lion's mane' jellyfish.

The marine biologist Alexander Semenov has spent more than two years in the hostile environment of the ultra-remote White Sea Biological Station, on the western coast of Russia.

Whenever he gets down-time, he floats his way beneath the surface, to capture images of the beautiful, if occasionally painful, creatures of the deep.

The underwater photographer breaks through arctic sea ice dropping into a cold -2C water - although still warmer than the -30C world up above.
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Butterfly

Bizarre poodle moth fascinates ... and frightens

Alan Boyle
NBC News Cosmic Log
Mon, 27 Aug 2012 17:45 UTC
Image
© Arthur Anker via FlickrZoologist Arthur Anker's picture of a Venezuela poodle moth has captured the curiosity of Internet onlookers.
It's been compared to a fluffy dog, a Pokemon character and a Power Rangers villain - but whatever it is, the Venezuelan poodle moth has captured the Internet like Mothra in a bad Japanese movie. Now it's up to the experts to figure out exactly where this moth belongs on the tree of life.

The first thing to emphasize is that the poodle moth is no phony [alleged] concoction like the jackalope, dogerpillar or chupacabra. Its cute, furry, scary look is totally in line with what's expected for a neotropical ornamental moth. In fact, cryptozoologist Karl Shuker found a similar picture of a white, fuzzy critter known as Diaphora mendica, or muslin moth, a member of the lepidopteran family Arctiidae.

The Venezuelan poodle moth is even more bizarre-looking than your run-of-the-mill muslin moth. That's largely due to the details that zoologist Arthur Anker of Brazil's Federal University of Ceara captured in the photograph he took in the Gran Sabana region of Venezuela's Canaima National Park several years ago.
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Clock

What Time Is It on Your Circadian Clock?

Dennis Normile
ScienceNow
Mon, 27 Aug 2012 15:10 UTC
Circadian Rythm
© PNASRound the clock. Tracking the levels of 50 hormones and amino acids in blood samples (shown by ribbons) reveals a body's internal time.
Are you a morning lark or a night owl? Scientists use that simplified categorization to explain that different people have different internal body clocks, commonly called circadian clocks. Sleep-wake cycles, digestive activities, and many other physiological processes are controlled by these clocks.

In recent years, researchers have found that internal body clocks can also affect how patients react to drugs. For example, timing a course of chemotherapy to the internal body time of cancer patients can improve treatment efficacy and reduce side effects.

But physicians have not been able to exploit these findings because determining internal body time is, well, time consuming. It's also cumbersome. The most established and reliable method requires taking blood samples from a patient hourly and tracking levels of the hormone melatonin, which previous research has tied closely to internal body time.

Now a Japanese group has come up with an alternative method of determining internal body time by constructing what it calls a molecular timetable based on levels in blood samples of more than 50 metabolites - hormones and amino acids - that result from biological activity. The researchers established a molecular timetable based on samples from three subjects and validated it using the conventional melatonin measurement. They then used that timetable to determine the internal body times of other subjects by checking the levels of the metabolites in just two blood samples from each subject per day.
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Info

Blue Moon This Week

Tammy Plotner
Universe Today
Mon, 27 Aug 2012 13:07 UTC
Blue Moon
© Astroprof
When you hear someone say "Once in a Blue Moon" you know what they mean. They're usually talking about something rare, silly, and even absurd. After all, when was the last time you saw the Moon turn blue? Well, rare or not, we're having one this week, and according to astronomer David Reneke writer and publicist for Australasian Science magazine, a Blue Moon is slated for the last day of this month, Friday, August 31.

It's not at all clear where the term 'Blue Moon' comes from. According to modern folklore it dates back at least 400 years. A Blue Moon is the second Full Moon in a calendar month. "Usually months have only one Full Moon, but occasionally a second one sneaks in, David said. "Ancient cultures around the world considered the second Full Moon to be spiritually significant."

Full Moons are separated by 29 days, while most months are 30 or 31 days long, so it is possible to fit two Full Moons in a single month. This happens every two and a half years, on average. By the way, February is the only month that can never have a Blue Moon by this definition. We had one Full Moon on August 2 this year and the second will be Friday night.
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A New Species of Type Ia Supernova?

Jason Major
Universe Today
Mon, 27 Aug 2012 13:00 UTC

Although they have been used as the "standard candles" of cosmic distance measurement for decades, Type Ia supernovae can result from different kinds of star systems, according to recent observations conducted by the Palomar Transient Factory team at California's Berkeley Lab.

Judging distances across intergalactic space from here on Earth isn't easy. Within the Milky Way - and even nearby galaxies - the light emitted by regularly pulsating stars (called Cepheid variables) can be used to determine how far away a region in space is. Outside of our own local group of galaxies, however, individual stars can't be resolved, and so in order to figure out how far away distant galaxies are astronomers have learned to use the light from much brighter objects: Type Ia supernovae, which can flare up with a brilliance equivalent to 5 billion Suns.

Type Ia supernovae are created from a special pairing of two stars orbiting each other: one super-dense white dwarf drawing material in from a companion until a critical mass - about 40% more massive than the Sun - is reached. The overpacked white dwarf suddenly undergoes a rapid series of thermonuclear reactions, exploding in an incredibly bright outburst of material and energy... a beacon visible across the Universe.

Because the energy and luminance of Type Ia supernovae have been found to be so consistently alike, distance can be gauged by their apparent brightness as seen from Earth. The dimmer one is when observed, the farther away its galaxy is. Based on this seemingly universal similarity it's been thought that these supernovae must be created under very similar situations... especially since none have been directly observed - until now.
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Ancient Termite-Digging Creature Added to Mammal Family Tree

Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience
Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:00 UTC
Pangolin
© Peter KondrashovA modern-day pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) skeleton (top) and the ancient Ernanodon antelios (bottom).
A new look at a fossil mammal with powerful front legs for digging is clearing up questions about the origin of a group of strange and scaly modern-day creatures called pangolins.

First excavated in Mongolia in the 1970s, the fossil sat in storage for decades until researchers for the Russian Academy of Sciences rediscovered and analyzed it, reporting their results today (Aug. 27) in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

What they found was a dog-size, strong-shouldered digger called Ernanodon. This mammal lived about 57 million years ago, after dinosaurs had died out and our furry ancestors had taken over.

Ernanodon was known from one other fossil found in China, but that specimen is warped, and some archaeologists even thought it might be a fake.

The new discovery puts those accusations to rest, said study researcher Peter Kondrashov, an anatomist at Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine in Missouri.

"It's the real deal," Kondrashov told LiveScience.
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Robot

Military robots set to patrol streets in texas?


Fox News
Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:00 UTC
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Laptop

Harvard researchers successfully cram 700 terabytes of data into a single gram with DNA storage

Sebastian Anthony
ExtremeTech
Fri, 17 Aug 2012 02:44 UTC
Image
A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard's Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data - around 700 terabytes - in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0).

To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it - just as if you were sequencing the human genome - and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) - so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.
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