Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Second World War U.S. Bomber Missing for 66 Years is Found in Adriatic Sea

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© BarcroftDiver Sabrina Monella explores the wreck of the B24 Tulsamerican bomber in the Adriatic Sea off Vis Island, Croatia.
An American man has found after a 27-year-search the wreckage of a Second World War bomber in which his air force pilot cousin was killed.

Gerald Landry, 73, spent the best part of three decades looking for the bomber pilot shot down by the Luftwaffe in December 1944.

Now, in a remarkable discovery, artefacts recovered from the bottom of the Adriatic Sea near Croatia could confirm the death of First Lt Russell Landry.

Lt Landry was part of an 800-strong force of Allied fighter pilots sent to bomb oil refineries in Blechhammer and Odertal, Germany.

However, Luftwaffe fighters supporting the German army at the Battle of the Bulge fended off the attack, shooting down 22 planes in just ten minutes.

Info

Ancient Tracks Identify Pioneering Reptiles

Newly-discovered 318-million year old animal tracks in Canada have confirmed the long-held theory that reptiles were the first vertebrates to thrive in Earth's arid inland environments.

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© Planet Earth OnlineAncient gecko-like reptiles thrived in continential interiors.
The tracks provide evidence for a key point in the history of life. They were formed during the period that saw the emergence of the first animals to lay hard-shelled eggs - a key feature of the reptiles' success.

A team of UK and Canadian researchers found the footprints in sea cliffs on the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada - by a mixture of luck and accident.

'We were looking for plant fossils in a remote location scattered with sandstone boulders,' says Dr Howard Falcon-Lang from Royal Holloway, University of London, who led the research team. 'I tripped over one of the boulders and saw all these wonderful trackways over the surface.'

Network

Google, CIA investing in "Future of Web Monitoring"


Noah Shachtman reports at Wired Danger Room blog that the investment arms of the CIA and Google are together backing a firm that monitors the web in real time, and claims to use that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents -- both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine "goes beyond search" by "looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events."

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online "momentum" for any given event.

Blackbox

Divers Plumb The Mysteries Of Sacred Maya Pools

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© VOPAUniversity of Illinois anthropology professor Lisa Lucero, who led the expedition, surveys Pool 1, the deepest of the pools her team explored.
Steering clear of crocodiles and navigating around massive submerged trees, a team of divers began mapping some of the 25 freshwater pools of Cara Blanca, Belize, which were important to the ancient Maya. In three weeks this May, the divers found fossilized animal remains, bits of pottery and - in the largest pool explored - an enormous underwater cave.

This project, led by University of Illinois anthropology professor Lisa Lucero and funded by the National Geographic Society and an Arnold O. Beckman Award, was the first of what Lucero hopes will be a series of dives into the pools of the southern Maya lowlands in central Belize.

The divers will return this summer to assess whether archaeological excavation is even possible at the bottom of the pools, some of which are more than 60 meters deep.

"We don't know if it's going to be feasible to conduct archaeology 200 feet below the surface," Lucero said. "But they are going to try."

Telescope

Hypatia - 4th Century Woman Astronomer

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© UnknownThe death of Hypatia, and the loss of the world's largest collection of scientific and mathematic writings, were factors that contributed to the halt of scientific advances in the West halt for nearly a thousand years.
The new movie Agora chronicles the life, challenges and death of Hypatia, a 4th Century woman astronomer whose contribution influenced and shaped modern science and our understanding of the world and the universe. Mabel Armstrong, author of the award-winning book Women Astronomers: Reaching for the Stars, tells Hypatia's story with the joy that a great science teacher (which she was) can bring to an old subject.

When Hypatia was born, her father, Theon, was a professor of mathematics and astronomy in Alexandria. He believed, as many Greeks did, that it was possible to raise a perfect human being. So he gave his daughter the best possible education, including studies in mathematics, languages, rhetoric, and natural philosophy-or science.

Upper-class women of the time were usually secluded, expected to devote themselves solely to their husband and children, but Hypatia found a job at the most famous institution in the ancient world, the library at Alexandria. She taught mathematics, physics, and astronomy, and wrote many books about these subjects-thirteen books on algebra, her favorite subject, and another eight books on geometry.

Telescope

Planets In Unusually Intimate Dance Around Dying Star

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© Bill YoungbloodCaltech astronomer John Johnson
Hundreds of extrasolar planets have been found over the past decade and a half, most of them solitary worlds orbiting their parent star in seeming isolation. With further observation, however, one in three of these systems have been found to have two or more planets.

Planets, it appears, come in bunches. Most of these systems contain planets that orbit too far from one another to feel each other's gravity. In just a handful of cases, planets have been found near enough to one another to interact gravitationally.

Now, however, John A. Johnson, an assistant professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and his colleagues have found two systems with pairs of gas giant planets locked in an orbital embrace.

In one system-a planetary pair orbiting the massive, dying star HD 200964, located roughly 223 light-years from Earth-the intimate dance is closer and tighter than any previously seen. "This new planet pair came in an unexpected package," says Johnson.

Adds Eric Ford of the University of Florida in Gainsville, "A planetary system with such closely spaced giant planets would be destroyed quickly if the planets weren't doing such a well synchronized dance. This makes it a real puzzle how the planets could have found their rhythm."

Telescope

Brilliant Star In A Colourful Neighbourhood

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© ESOThis image of part of the Carina Nebula was created from images taken through red, green and blue filters with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile.
A spectacular new image from ESO's Wide Field Imager at the La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the brilliant and unusual star WR 22 and its colourful surroundings. WR 22 is a very hot and bright star that is shedding its atmosphere into space at a rate many millions of times faster than the Sun. It lies in the outer part of the dramatic Carina Nebula from which it formed.

Very massive stars live fast and die young. Some of these stellar beacons have such intense radiation passing through their thick atmospheres late in their lives that they shed material into space many millions of times more quickly than relatively sedate stars such as the Sun.

These rare, very hot and massive objects are known as Wolf-Rayet stars, after the two French astronomers who first identified them in the mid-nineteenth century, and one of the most massive ones yet measured is known as WR 22.

Question

X Prize offers cash for oil spill cleaners

Today the Gulf, tomorrow the world

This Thursday, the X Prize Foundation will announce its next competition: a challenge to inventors and entrepreneurs to find ways to clean up after such environmental disasters as BP's Gulf gusher.

The effort won't encompass the entire mess that BP has made, nor will it target all the oil released in future underwater discharges of Texas tea. It will, in the words of the Foundation's announcement of its upcoming announcement: "inspire entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists worldwide to develop innovative, rapidly deployable, and highly efficient methods of capturing crude oil from the ocean surface."

Meteor

Aquarid meteor shower peaking July 28th and 29th

The University of Western Ontario meteor radar is picking up strong returns from the Southern Delta Aquarid meteor shower, which peaks on July 28th and 29th. Sky watchers (particularly in the southern hemisphere) should be alert for meteors between about 10 pm and dawn.

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© University of Western Ontario

"Visual rates could be as high as 20 per hour," notes Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, "although glare from the nearly full Moon will make the fainter meteors difficult to see."

Sun

Strange Sunrise

On Monday morning, July 26th, John Stetson woke up early to watch the sunrise over Casco Bay in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He expected a pretty view. What he got was pretty strange:

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© John Stetson

"The island appeared to be floating above the water," Stetson reports. "And the sun was as flat as a pancake!"

Atmospheric optics expert explains what happened: "Overnight the air above the ocean was abnormally cooled producing a temperature inversion, cool air below warmer. At sunrise the almost horizontal sun's rays were bent (refracted) as they passed between the different temperature layers to give us a mock mirage. The island was also miraged. The sea was not really choppy, that is the uneven edge of the mirage."

"At sunset the ocean sometimes produces a warmer air above it to give another type of mirage - an Etruscan vase," he adds. "Watch sunrise and sunset for magical effects!"