Science & TechnologyS


Bug

US Air Force studies fruit-flies to build killer insect swarm drones

Lewis Page
The Register
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 04:39 UTC
Tiny droid lands on your neck and BLAM - you're dead

The US Air Force is engaged in wacky research on fruit flies manoeuvring within a heavily instrumented "simulation tunnel" in order to develop tiny, potentially murderous insect-sized flying robots.
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Rocket

SpaceX Becomes First Private Company to Put Capsule in Orbit

Jason Mick
DailyTech
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 20:07 UTC
Image
© LA TimesThis morning SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket enjoyed the first successful launch of its Dragon capsule. The capsule is designed to ferry supplies and passengers to the International Space Station. The company hopes to be delivering cargo by the end of 2011, and passengers by 2013.
This morning SpaceX became the first private corporation to launch a large capsule into Earth orbit, marking a landmark in the exploration of space.

At approximately 10:43 a.m. ET the company's Dragon capsule launched from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Kennedy Space Center, aboard a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket. The stages performed flawlessly.

The launch began with the first stage's nine powerful Merlin 1C engines roaring to life. As they died, the first stage dropped as planned, and the rocket soared through the upper atmosphere. The second stage, which employs Merlin Vacuum engine, then began firing, propelling the rocket towards orbit. The second stage then successfully separated, and the protective capsule cone fell away just as planned.

The only remaining objective is to test the capsule's heat shield for a successful reentry into the Earth's atmosphere.
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Info

Fear of Farming

Caroline Wickham-Jones
Past Horizons
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:40 UTC
Image
© Unknown
I've been working in archaeology for over 30 years and I try to tell myself that my chosen profession has not just been a self indulgence, but that it can have relevance to others and to the way we live today. Personally, I try to be as 'green' as possible, though I know I could do more: I use the car more than I should; put the heating on during the day; buy the occasional pineapple; and frequently fly when I travel south. Recently I have become an 'academic' (for which read 'got a job') so I am now a born again enthusiast for telling people about the archaeology that I love - if I like the Mesolithic, so should my students! If my students like the Mesolithic, so should everyone!! For the past couple of years I have been working on some ideas that try to make sense of my archaeology in the world of today, while re-awakening interest in the ancient hunter-gatherer population who lived in Britain before the development of farming some 6000 years ago.
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Sun

Sunspot 1131 Looks Like A Sunflower


Space Weather
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:48 UTC
Sunspot 1131 is very photogenic and "looks like a sunflower," says Rogerio Marcon of Campinas, Brazil:

Image
© SDO/HMI
View a 2-Day movie here.
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Sun

Aurora Sky Station Northern Lights


Space Weather
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:43 UTC
Last night (Dec. 7th) a minor gust of solar wind gently buffeted Earth's magnetic field. At the Aurora Sky Station in Sweden, above the Arctic Circle, a gentle gust is all it takes to ignite auroras you can reach out and touch ... almost:

Image
© Chad Blakley
"Every night our staff checks spaceweather.com to see what the future may hold," says Sky Station photographer Chad Blakley. "Needless to say, we were all excited when we saw the density of the solar wind rise above 15 protons/cm3. Soon the auroras began, and they did not stop until we all went home six hours later." (For the record, the auroras pictured above were more than 100 km above Blakeley's head.)

A more forceful gust of solar wind is en route to Earth, due to arrive on Dec. 10th. High-latitude sky watchers should remain alert for auroras.
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Sun

Sunspot Sunrise Surprise


Space Weather
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:39 UTC
Sunspot 1131 is so big, it can be seen without the aid of a solar telescope. On Dec. 6th, Terry Reis "spotted" it while photographing the sunrise from White Plains Beach, Oahu, Hawaii:

Image
© Terry Reis
"Other than the sunspot, it was a completely routine Hawaiian sunrise," says Reis. "Beautiful!"

Sunspot 1131 is big, but quiet. The behemoth spot has a simple, stable magnetic field that poses little threat for a major eruption. At the moment it is producing more pretty pictures than solar flares. Browse the links, below, for examples.
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Blackbox

Best of the Web: Massive dark object 'lurking on edge of solar system hurling comets at Earth'


Daily Mail
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:12 UTC
solar system/oort cloud
© Donald K. Yeoman/NASA, JPLA Nasa graphic which illustrates how the Oort Cloud surrounds our solar system. Scientists believe that an object with a huge mass may be pushing comets towards Earth from the cloud
A massive dark object may be lurking on the edge of our solar system, according to scientists.

Most comets that fly into the inner solar system seem to come from the outer region of the Oort cloud - a region of icy dust and debris left over from the birth of the solar system.

The cloud starts from a point about 93 billion miles from the Sun and stretches for around three light years and contains billions of comets, most of them small and hidden.

Now new calculations suggest a large object that is up to four times as big as Jupiter could be responsible for sending them in our direction.

The scientists have analysed the comets in the Oort cloud and deduced that 25 per-cent of them would need a nudge by a body of at least Jupiter size before they changed orbit.

Astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire at the University of Louisiana came up with theory said that "something smaller than a Jovian mass would not be strong enough to perform the task".
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Question

Was NASA's Big Announcement a Big Mistake?


The Week
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 12:12 UTC
Felisa Wolfe-Simon
© GettyNASA research fellow Felisa Wolfe-Simon was part of the presentation team that announced the potential new life form discovered in California.

With great fanfare, NASA announced last week that it had discovered a new form of microbial life that can live on arsenic in a lake in California. Even if the discovery left some underwhelmed, it was generally greeted as a breakthrough, a paradigm shift in how we should think about life itself. That is, until critical scientists began poking holes in NASA's research. Here, a guide to the amazing discovery that might be anything but.

So, what did NASA discover again?

Last week, NASA announced the discovery of a new type of microbe, one that used arsenic - and not, like every other living thing on earth, phosphorous  - to build its biological make-up. This discovery, NASA claimed, would change everything scientists thought they knew about the creation of life and broaden our ability to look for life in outer space.
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Satellite

Japan's Akatsuki Probe Fails to Enter Venus Orbit


BBC News
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 11:43 UTC
Image
© JaxaAn artist's impression of the Akatsuki probe at the planet Venus
Japan's first space probe bound for Venus has failed to enter the planet's orbit, the country's space agency says.

The space craft, Akatsuki, is believed to have passed Venus after it failed to slow down sufficiently.

Akatsuki, launched about 200 days ago, fired its main engine just before 0000 GMT on Monday to allow the planet's gravity to capture the probe.

A previous interplanetary space probe launched by Japan in 1998 to orbit Mars was also a failure.

Akatsuki briefly lost contact but was now back in communication and functioning normally as it headed off around the sun, officials said.

"Unfortunately, it did not attain an orbit," said Hitoshi Soeno of the space agency, Jaxa.

"But it appears to be functioning and we may be able to try again when it passes by Venus six years from now."

The failure was disappointing for the 200,000 names carried by the craft in a bid to raise awareness of Japan's space programme.
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Cell Phone

The Sinister Threat to Our Language and Brains

Martin Robbins
The Guardian, UK
Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:57 UTC
We should be grateful to the Plain English Campaign, those literary canaries of the modern world, for their tireless vigilance in protecting the purity of our precious bodily flu our language. Without them we would remain blissfully unaware of perhaps the deadliest threat we as a civilization have faced since the last fall in house prices - new words are infecting our society.

The infection naturally started with our children. For too long we have ignored the warnings of social meltdown due to the use of computers from scientists like Susan Greenfield, in spite of the publication of her research in prominent social science journals such as The Daily Mail, and a fiction novel set in the 22nd century.

"Social websites harm children's brains" came the "chilling warning to parents from [a] top neuroscientist." We laughed then, but nobody's laughing now, because children aren't capable of laughter any more - they just type 'LOL' endlessly into the 'twatting' form on their 'MyFace' Ceefax page while dribbling onto their iPhones.

Much of the blame for this new word epidemic lies in the increasing adoption of in-ear headphones. These sinister devices embed themselves inside the heads of children, beaming word memes directly thought their thin skulls and into their brains, rewiring the mouth-neurons until all they can store are chains of meaningless, disconnected letters like 'LOL', 'ROFL', 'WTF' and 'Justin Bieber'.
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