Science & TechnologyS


Cloud Lightning

Giant antimatter hurling monstrosities! Thunderstorms: Crazier than ever before

Martin Turczynowicz
The Manitoban
Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:23 UTC
thunder lightning
© Unknown
With every development in technology and every increase in the sensitivity of detection instruments, it seems the universe only ever gets larger and more complicated. With the advent of the microscope came the discovery of worlds within worlds, bacteria and microbes living their lives parallel to our own. With computers and advanced digital modeling came the understanding of the workings of DNA and genomes - only to leave us wanting ever more as we found these structures to be more elegant and complex than we could have imagined.

Now NASA has shed new light on a phenomenon that has been with us since the dawn of time. Using the Fermi Gamma-Ray space telescope, researchers have discovered that our very own planet generates and launches beams of antimatter into space.
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Info

Man-Made Comet Crater


SpaceWeather
Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00 UTC
In July 2005, NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft dropped an 820-lb copper projectile onto the surface of Comet Tempel 1. Almost six years later, NASA finally saw the impact crater. On Valentine's Day 2011, long after the dust had cleared, Stardust-NExT flew past Tempel 1 and photographed the impact site:

Tempel 1 Crater
© NASA
It's not very impressive--and that is telling. The lack of a well-defined crater reveals much about the structural integrity of the comet's surface. Science team member Pete Schultz of Brown University explains: "We see a [shallow] crater with a small mound in the center, and it appears that some of the ejecta went up and came right back down. This tells us this cometary nucleus is fragile and weak based on how subdued the crater is we see today."

Stay tuned for updates as the analysis progresses beyond the "first-look" stage, and meanwhile, browse the flyby gallery.
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Info

Rare Stellar 'Water Fountain' Discovered

Megan Goldspink
Cosmos Online
Tue, 15 Feb 2011 21:56 UTC
W43A Water Maser
© Kirk Woellert/National Science FoundationArtist's conception of the aging star, W43A, surrounded by a disk of material and a water maser - a precessing, twisted jet of molecules streaming away from it in two directions.

Perth: Three new water masers have been discovered in the Milky Way, including what could be one of the fastest ever found - reaching speeds of up to 350 km per second - and a rare 'water fountain' type.

Water fountains are a special class of 'masers' - large microwave lasers caused by high-mass dying stars or high-mass star formation regions. The high mass source spews out material including clouds of water that can travel at a couple of hundred kilometres per second.

"At this speed [350 km/sec] it would be possible to surf the outflow from Sydney to London in under one minute," said Glen Rees from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) summer vacation program, who found the three masers using data collected by the H2O Southern Galactic Plane Survey (HOPS).
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Telescope

Stunning Nasa image shows giant ring of black holes created by two interacting galaxies


The Daily Mail
Tue, 15 Feb 2011 18:43 UTC
At first glance this amazing image looks like a ring of jewels in space.

But, somewhat surprisingly, the data actually shows a ring of black holes in Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies located 430million light years from Earth.

The composite image was taken from data collated from Nasa's Chandra X-ray Observatory and its Hubble Space Telescope.

Information gathered by Chandra is shown in pink while optical data from Hubble is red, green and blue.

black hole intersecting galaxies
© NasaA ring of black holes: This composite image of Arp 147
Arp 147 contains the remnant of a spiral galaxy, which can be seen on the right hand side of the image, that collided with the elliptical galaxy seen on the left.

This collision has produced an expanding wave of star formation that shows up as a blue ring containing in abundance of massive young stars.

These stars race through their evolution in a few million years or less and explode as supernovas, leaving behind neutron stars and black holes.

A fraction of the neutron stars and black holes will have companion stars, and may become bright X-ray sources as they pull in matter from their companions.

The nine X-ray sources scattered around the ring in Arp 147 are so bright that they must be black holes, with masses that are likely ten to 20 times that of the sun.
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Saturn

Largest planet in the solar system could be about to be discovered - and it's up to four times the size of Jupiter


Daily Mail
Tue, 15 Feb 2011 06:58 UTC
Image
© unkA new world? Astronomers believe a huge gas giant may be within the remote Oort Cloud region
Scientists believe they may have found a new planet in the far reaches of the solar system, up to four times the mass of Jupiter.

Its orbit would be thousands of times further from the Sun than the Earth's - which could explain why it has so far remained undiscovered.

Data which could prove the existence of Tyche, a gas giant in the outer Oort Cloud, is set to be released later this year - although some believe proof has already been garnered by Nasa with its pace telescope, Wise, and is waiting to be pored over.
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Sheeple

U.S. & Canada Agree to Common Biometric "Perimeter" Fence

Alex Newman
The New American
Fri, 11 Feb 2011 12:02 UTC
Image
© PunditKitchen.com
The move toward a North American Union received another big boost last week as President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper met in Washington, D.C. to hammer out a deal on creating a common "perimeter" around the two countries while diminishing the role of the nations' shared border and developing a biometric system to track North Americans.

The two leaders, touting the plan as a move toward security and prosperity, signed a four-page declaration supposedly committing the two countries to working together on a wide range of issues. According to news reports, the final agreement was the product of many months of work.

The meeting also resulted in the creation of a "Beyond the Border Working Group," which will be charged with the declaration's implementation and with reporting to the U.S. President and the Canadian Prime Minister in the next few months and on a regular basis after that.

"Security" and "prosperity" were, as usual, two of the main focuses. "To preserve and extend the benefits our close relationship has helped bring to Canadians and Americans alike, we intend to pursue a perimeter approach to security, working together within, at, and away from the borders of our two countries to enhance our security and accelerate the legitimate flow of people, goods, and services between our two countries," the declaration states. It also praises the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.
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Info

US: Woman Gives Birth to Own Grandson

Paul Thompson
The Telegraph, UK
Sun, 13 Feb 2011 05:44 UTC
Image
© Chicago TribuneSara Connell, left, holds her new baby Finnean at Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago. Sara's mother, Kristine Casey, 61, served as a surrogate for her daughter
A 61 year-old woman in the US has given birth to her own grandson.

Kristine Casey acted as a surrogate for daughter Sara Connell after she was unable to have children of her own.

Mrs Connell and her husband Bill are the biological parents of the boy, who is called Finnean.

The 35 year-old lecturer sat holding her mother's hand as she delivered the baby boy at a hospital in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

She said her mother, who gave birth to her last child almost 30 years ago, had offered to act as a surrogate when she suffered years of heartache trying to conceive.

Mrs Connell said she underwent IVF treatment in 2004 but delivered stillborn twins, and later she suffered a miscarriage.
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Beaker

Taking the Mystery Out of Photosynthesis


PhysOrg
Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:00 UTC
Taking the mystery out of photosynthesis
© PhysOrg.comThe team found that manganese (pink) and oxygen (red) form a central column that supports large ligands, made of nitrogen, carbon (gray), and hydrogen (white).
An enigmatic protein system that uses sunlight and water to create fuel became a little less mysterious, thanks to scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Michigan, and University of California - Davis.

The photoactive protein known as the oxygen-evolving complex, or OEC, is found in plants and algae and is deeply involved in photosynthesis. Determining the geometric and electronic structures of a model for OEC was done using ultra-cold experimental and first-principle theoretical techniques.

Through photosynthesis, plants and algae use intermittent sunlight to create readily available fuels. Scientists and energy experts want to design industrial plants to do the same thing. But before this process can be designed and controlled on the large scale, it must be understood on the small scale. Uncovering OEC's structure provides fundamental insights for modeling and simulating the molecule's behavior. With greater confidence in models, scientists can delve more deeply into the photosynthesis process, learning what is needed to mimic the process on the large scale.
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Star

Jovian moon Europa helps solve mystery of Jupiter's missing belt


Asian News International
Thu, 10 Feb 2011 09:53 UTC
jupiter
© Unknown
Astronomers can now see the ongoing turmoil inside Jupiter's missing - and slowly re-emerging - South Equatorial Belt in unprecedented detail, courtesy the Keck II telescope's adaptive optics system and the cooperation of the icy Jovian moon Europa.

In this newly released Keck image, the gas giant is shown as it looks in thermal infrared (IR) light, at a wavelength of nearly 5 microns (shown in bright red and yellow), overlaid on a composite image of three shorter, near-infrared bands (1.21, 1.58, and 1.65 microns).

"The thermal IR senses breaks in the cloud cover," said astronomer Mike Wong of the University of California at Berkeley.

The thermal IR data is essentially showing heat from Jupiter's interior being radiated into space. The three other IR bands, in contrast, capture reflected sunlight.
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Pharoah

Did the ancient Egyptians know of pygmy mammoths? Well, there is that tomb painting

Darren Naish
scienceblogs.com
Sun, 13 Feb 2011 06:42 UTC
One of the things that came up in the many comments appended to the article on Bob's painting of extinct Maltese animals was the famous Egyptian tomb painting of the 'pygmy mammoth'. You're likely already familiar with this (now well known) case: here's the image, as it appears on the beautifully decorated tomb wall of Rekhmire, 'Governor of the Town' of Thebes, and vizier of Egypt during the reigns of Tuthmose III and Amenhotep II (c. 1479 to 1401 BCE) during the XVIII dynasty...
Image

In 1994, Baruch Rosen published a brief article in Nature in which he drew attention to the small, tusked, hairy elephant in the painting, shown as being waist-high to the accompanying people. The people next to the elephant seem to be Syrian traders, carrying objects that include tusks (note that a small bear is shown in the painting as well: that's very interesting but I don't have time to discuss it here). African elephants Loxodonta and the now extinct Middle Eastern population of the Asian elephant Elephas maximus were both known to the ancient Egyptians, but Rekhmire's elephant doesn't seem to be either. Its apparent hairiness, convex back and domed head make it look like a juvenile Asian elephant, but then why it is shown with huge tusks? It seems to have a fairly large ear [the best close-up I could get is shown below], though whether this ear is shaped more like that of Loxodonta or Elephas is difficult to say.
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