Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Prehistoric Stonehenge Visitors Came from the Mediterranean and the Alps

Image
© NERCThe 'Mediterranean' Boy with the Amber Necklace burial at Boscombe Down, about 3 kilometres from Stonehenge
The links between the Stonehenge area and the Mediterranean have been debated for years.

Recent research suggest that some of the people buried in the area during the Bronze Age were not local. Rather, they came from both the snow of the Alps and the heat of the Mediterranean to visit Stonehenge.

The analysis of the teeth from two males provides new evidence that one dubbed 'the Boy with the Amber necklace' had come from the Mediterranean area, whilst it confirms the 'Amesbury Archer' had come from the Alps.

The Amesbury Archer was discovered around five kilometres from Stonehenge. His is the richest Copper Age (2450 - 2300 BC) grave found in Britain and it contained some of Britain's earliest gold and copper objects - a pair of gold hair clasps and three copper daggers.

Binoculars

World's Biggest Solar Powered Boat Sets Sail

The state-of-the-art catamaran which is 31 metres long and 15 metres wide, was launched in Monaco.


Info

Reconstructing human appearance from DNA

Police sketch artists might soon be trading in the pencil and paper for a genetics lab. Forensic biologists say they may soon be able to reconstruct a criminal's profile from the DNA they leave at a crime scene.

This would potentially render DNA databases obsolete, said molecular biologist Manfred Kayser from Erasmus MC in Rotterdam in his keynote address at the 20th International Symposium of Forensic Science, in Sydney in September.

Info

Alternative to X-Rays Makes Its First Step

Image
© Sylvain Gigan et al.The initial object imaged through a layer of white paint (A) was a 32-pixel by 32-pixel image of a flower; the image was reconstructed with a new technique (B), matching the original by roughly 94.5 percent.
A day when doctors need only visible light instead of X-rays to view a patient's innards can now be more easily imagined, with the announcement of a way to decipher the little light that passes through opaque materials.

Normally, one cannot see through opaque barriers such as paint, skin, fabric or eggshells because any light that does manage to make it through such materials is scattered in complicated and seemingly random ways. [Infographic: How Light Works]

Meteor

University of Hawaii at Manoa Pan-STARRS discovers first potentially hazardous asteroid

Image
© PS1SCTwo images of 2010 ST3 (circled in green) taken by PS1 on the night of Sept. 16 show the asteroid moving against the background field of stars and galaxies.
The University of Hawaii' at Mānoa's Pan-STARRS PS1 telescope on Haleakala has discovered an asteroid that will come within 4 million miles of Earth in mid-October. The object is about 150 feet in diameter and was discovered in images acquired on September 16, when it was about 20 million miles away. It is the first "potentially hazardous object" (PHO) to be discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey and has been given the designation "2010 ST3."

"Although this particular object won't hit Earth in the immediate future, its discovery shows that Pan-STARRS is now the most sensitive system dedicated to discovering potentially dangerous asteroids," said Dr. Robert Jedicke, a University of Hawaii at Mānoa member of the PS1 Scientific Consortium (PS1SC), who is working on the asteroid data from the telescope. "This object was discovered when it was too far away to be detected by other asteroid surveys," Jedicke noted.

Einstein

First Observation of Hawking Radiation

Hawkings Radiation
© Technology Review, MIT
Hawking predicted it in 1974. Now physicists say they've seen it for the first time.

For some time now, astronomers have been scanning the heavens looking for signs of Hawking radiation. So far, they've come up with zilch.

Today, it looks as if they've been beaten to the punch by a group of physicists who say they've created Hawking radiation in their lab. These guys reckon they can produce Hawking radiation in a repeatable unambiguous way, finally confirming Hawking's prediction. Here's how they did it.

Physicists have long realised that on the smallest scale, space is filled with a bubbling melee of particles leaping in and out of existence. These particles form as particle-antiparticle pairs and rapidly annihilate, returning their energy to the vacuum.

Hawking's prediction came from thinking about what might happen to particle pairs that form at the edge of a black hole. He realised that if one of the pair were to cross the event horizon, it could never return. But its partner on the other side would be free to go.

To an observer it would look as if the black hole were producing a constant stream of quantum particles, which became known as Hawking radiation.

Since then, other physicists have pointed out that black holes aren't the only place where event horizons can form. Any medium in which waves travel can support an event horizon and in theory, it should be possible to see Hawking radiation in these media too.

Info

Hang On! Earth's Surface Moving North

As you read this, the Earth's surface is shifting right underneath you, creeping very slowly toward the North Pole. Scientists say the shift is greater than they expected, but other than some minor effects on satellites, life will go on.

Researchers have found that the shift of water mass around the globe, combined with so-called post-glacial rebound, is shifting Earth's surface relative to its center of mass by 0.035 inches (0.88 millimeters) a year toward the North Pole.

Post-glacial rebound is the response of the solid Earth to the retreat of glaciers and the resulting loss of the hefty weight. As glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, the land under the ice began to rise and continues to do so. Therefore, models predicted, the solid crust at the surface should be moving northward, in relation to the planet's center of mass.

Now there's hard data to support the model's prediction.

To calculate the changes, scientists combined gravity data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites with measurements of global surface movements from GPS and a model developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that estimates the mass of Earth's ocean above any point on the ocean floor.

Magnify

Stuxnet Worm is the "Work of a National Government Agency"

Image
© SymantecGraph shows concentration of Stuxnet-infected computers in Iran as of August.
Malware believed to be targeting Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant may have been created by Israeli hackers

A computer worm which targets industrial and factory systems is almost certainly the work of a national government agency, security experts told the Guardian - but warn that it will be near-impossible to identify the culprit.

The "Stuxnet" computer worm, which has been described as one of the "most refined pieces of malware ever discovered", has been most active in Iran, says the security company Symantec - leading some experts to conjecture that the likely target of the virus is the controversial Bushehr nuclear power plant, and that it was created by Israeli hackers.

Speaking to the Guardian, security experts confirmed that Stuxnet is a targeted attack on industrial locations in specific countries, the sophistication of which takes it above and beyond previous attacks of a similar nature.

Stormtrooper

Fraunhofer boffins develop 'Titanium foam' endoskeletal implants

Vorsprung durch bendo-Materialforschung

Titanium - it's everywhere these days, long having spread beyond its initial uses in aerospace. Fruitbite laptops are cased in it, high-end tools and cutlery are made from it, there's even jewellery.

titaniumfoam
© The RegisterThe latest in foamalloy endoskeletons.

Display

IBM 'one atom, one bit' storage breakthrough

Is that a terabyte in your pocket, or...?

If you've been hankering for a multi-terabyte USB thumb drive, you may be in luck: IBM scientists have developed a technique that could - eventually - help increase data-storage densities by orders of magnitude.

The breakthrough, announced Friday, allows researchers to measure how long a bit of information can be retained in an individual atom. It does so by capturing, recording, and visualizing the magnetic properties of that atom in real time.

Using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to essentially record a "movie" of an atom's magnetic behavior, that behavior can now be analyzed at frame rates one million times faster than before, according to researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San José, California - down to a nanosecond time frame.

And as Andreas Heinrich, a physicist at the Almaden center pointed out: "To put this in perspective, one nanosecond to one second is the equivalent of one second to 30 years."