Science & TechnologyS


HAL9000

Hawking's big-bang team harness SGI super power

Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Register
Fri, 13 Aug 2010 03:46 UTC
A precise science demands big hardware

Cambridge University cosmologists working with physicist Stephen Hawking are getting their first real taste of supercomputing power as they upgrade to Silicon Graphics' Altix UV parallel supers.

The UK Computational Cosmology Consortium, which was established in 1997 by Hawking to probe the structure of the universe in the immediate wake of the hot Big Bang, now has over 30 researchers from ten different universities around the country.

COSMOS, as the consortium and its systems are both known, has been an SGI customer since day one, starting out with a 32-processor Origin 2000 parallel system back in 1997 when that was still pretty cool iron.
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Saturn

Home computers discover rare star


BBC
Fri, 13 Aug 2010 03:27 UTC
skymap
© BBCThe Einstein@Home screensaver shows the area of sky being processed
By putting their home computers to work when they would otherwise be idle, three "citizen scientists" have discovered a rare astronomical object.

The unusual find is called a "disrupted binary pulsar"; these pulsars can be created when a massive star collapses.

The discoverers, from the US and Germany found the object with the help of the Einstein@Home project.

It asks users to donate time on their computers, allowing them to be used for searching through scientific data.

This type of project is known as "distributed computing". Einstein@Home harnesses the power of home machines in order to process large amounts of data.

Credited with the discovery are Chris and Helen Colvin, both information technology professionals from Iowa, US, and systems analyst Daniel Gebhardt from Mainz in Germany.

Their computers, along with 500,000 others from around the world, are being used to analyse data for Einstein@Home.
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Blackbox

Jupiter swallowed a super-Earth

David Shiga
New Scientist
Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:15 UTC
Image
© University of Arizona/JLP/NASAThe solar system's mightiest planet
Jupiter might have secured its position as the solar system's mightiest planet by killing an up-and-coming rival, new simulations suggest. The work could explain why the planet has a relatively small heart, and paints a grisly picture of the early solar system, where massive, rocky "super-Earths" were snuffed out before they could grow into gas giants.

Jupiter and Saturn are thought to have begun life as rocky worlds with the mass of at least a few Earths. Their gravity then pulled in gas from their birth nebula, giving them dense atmospheres.

In this picture, all gas giants should have cores of roughly the same size. Yet spacecraft-based gravity measurements suggest Jupiter's core weighs just two to 10 Earth masses, while Saturn's comes in at 15 to 30.

New simulations by Shu Lin Li of Peking University in China, and colleagues, may explain why. They calculated what would happen when a super-Earth of 10 times the mass of our planet slammed into a gas giant. The rocky body flattened like a pancake when it hit the gas giant's atmosphere, then barrelled into the giant's core about half an hour later. The energy of the collision could have vaporised much of the core.
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Better Earth

World's largest tidal turbine unveiled in Scotland

Rachel Fielding
The Guardian
Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:42 UTC
Image
© Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
The world's largest tidal turbine was yesterday unveiled at a facility in Invergordon, Scotland, marking the culmination of a decade of development activity and moving tidal power one step closer to commercial viability.

The AK1000 was developed by Atlantis Resources Corporation, a developer of electricity-generating tidal current turbines, and is due to be installed on the sea bed and connected to the grid at a dedicated berth at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney later this summer.

The company said the turbine is capable of generating enough electricity for more than 1,000 homes and is designed for harsh weather and rough, open ocean environments such as those off the Scottish coast.
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Meteor

Neptune 'dead zones' hold more rocks than asteroid belt

Caitlin Stier
ScienceMag
Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:00 UTC
Image
© NASANeptune's Trojan asteroids, which share the planet's orbit, may outnumber those in the solar system's main asteroid belt
An asteroid that is trapped in a 'dead zone' behind Neptune has been found for the first time. The finding suggests that the blue planet's rock collection may outnumber objects in the main asteroid belt and may provide clues to the origin of comets.

Objects can become trapped in two gravitational dead zones around Neptune, where the forces of the sun and the planet balance out. In the last decade, astronomers have identified six asteroids - called Trojans - in the zone that moves in front of the planet along its orbit. But finding Trojans in the region trailing the planet has proved more difficult, because the faint light reflected off of objects there is washed out by brighter starlight from the plane of the Milky Way.
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Meteor

Asteroid Found In Gravitational Dead Zone


Space Daily / SPX
Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:15 UTC
Image
© Scott SheppardThe green arrow shows the asteroid. The other bright objects are stars in the Milky Way.
There are places in space where the gravitational tug between a planet and the Sun balance out, allowing other smaller bodies to remain stable. These places are called Lagrangian points. So-called Trojan asteroids have been found in some of these stable spots near Jupiter and Neptune.

Trojans share their planet's orbit and help astronomers understand how the planets formed and how the solar system evolved. Now Scott Sheppard at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and Chad Trujillo* have discovered the first Trojan asteroid, 2008 LC18, in a difficult-to-detect stability region at Neptune, called the Lagrangian L5 point.

They used the discovery to estimate the asteroid population there and find that it is similar to the asteroid population at Neptune's L4 point. The research is published in the August 12, 2010, online issue of Science Express.
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Better Earth

Ancient Hawaiian Glaciers Reveal Clues To Global Climate Impacts


Terra Daily / SPX
Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:32 UTC
Image
© Oregon State UniversityGray rubble on the flanks of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii lie in contrast to the red volcanic rock behind them, and were deposited by a glacier that disappeared thousands of years ago.
Boulders deposited by an ancient glacier that once covered the summit of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii have provided more evidence of the extraordinary power and reach of global change, particularly the slowdown of a North Atlantic Ocean current system that could happen again and continues to be a concern to climate scientists.

A new study has found geochemical clues near the summit of Mauna Kea that tell a story of ancient glacier formation, the influence of the most recent ice age, more frequent major storms in Hawaii, and the impact of a distant climatic event that changed much of the world.

The research was published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters by scientists from Oregon State University, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of British Columbia and U.S. Geological Survey. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

"Mauna Kea had a large glacial ice cap of about 70 square kilometers until 14,500 years ago, which has now all disappeared," said Peter Clark, a professor of geosciences at OSU. "We've been able to use new data to determine specifically when, where and most likely why the glacier existed and then disappeared."
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Sherlock

Reading The Zip Codes Of 3,500-Year-Old Letters


Terra Daily / SPX
Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:03 UTC
Image
© UnknownProf. Yuval Goren demonstrates the portable x-ray device on an ancient tablet
Unfortunately, when ancient kings sent letters to each other, their post offices didn't record the sender' return address. It takes quite a bit of super-sleuthing by today's archaeologists to determine the geographical origin of this correspondence - which can reveal a great deal about ancient rulers and civilizations.

Now, by adapting an off-the-shelf portable x-ray lab tool that analyzes the composition of chemicals, Prof. Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations can reveal hidden information about a tablet's composition without damaging the precious ancient find itself.

These x-rays reveal the soil and clay composition of a tablet or artefact, to help determine its precise origin.

But Prof. Goren's process, based on x-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry, can go much further. Over the years, he has collected extensive data through physical "destructive" sampling of artefacts.
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Better Earth

An Ancient Earth Like Ours


Terra Daily / SPX
Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:37 UTC
Image
© UnknownMud Cracks, Ordovician Period, Manlius formation (limestone), town of New Salem, (eastern) New York. More evidence of warm shallow sea conditions from 400 million years ago, long before the rocks of the Connecticut Valley formed.
An international team of scientists including Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz of the Geology Department of the University of Leicester, and led by Dr. Thijs Vandenbroucke, formerly of Leicester and now at the University of Lille 1 (France), has reconstructed the Earth's climate belts of the late Ordovician Period, between 460 and 445 million years ago.

The findings have been published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA - and show that these ancient climate belts were surprisingly like those of the present.

The researchers state: "The world of the ancient past had been thought by scientists to differ from ours in many respects, including having carbon dioxide levels much higher - over twenty times as high - than those of the present.
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Sherlock

Oldest Earth Mantle Reservoir Discovered


Terra Daily / SPX
Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:29 UTC
Image
© Don Francis, McGill UniversityView of the basalts along the northeastern coast of Baffin Island.
Researchers have found a primitive Earth mantle reservoir on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Geologist Matthew Jackson and his colleagues from a multi-institution collaboration report the finding--the first discovery of what may be a primitive Earth mantle--this week in the journal Nature.

The Earth's mantle is a rocky, solid shell that is between the Earth's crust and the outer core, and makes up about 84 percent of the Earth's volume. The mantle is made up of many distinct portions or reservoirs that have different chemical compositions.

Scientists had previously concluded that the Earth was slightly older than 4.5 billion years old, but had not found a piece of the Earth's primitive mantle.

Until recently, researchers generally thought that the Earth and the other planets of the solar system were chondritic, meaning that the mantle's chemistry was thought to be similar to that of chondrites--some of the oldest, most primitive objects in the solar system.
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