Science & TechnologyS


Rocket

Russia to kick off construction of a new spaceport

Katia Moskvitch
BBC
Tue, 20 Jul 2010 10:37 UTC
Russias spaceport
© BBCOnce the shuttle fleet is retired, the Soyuz spacecraft will be the only way to get to the ISS
Russia will invest US $800m (£527m) into a new spaceport in the country's Far East, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has announced.

The move is meant to ease the dependence on the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan, built during the Soviet-era.

The future cosmodrome will be built near the town of Uglegorsk in the Far Eastern Amur region, close to the border with China.

It is planned to be mostly used for civilian launches and should be operational by 2015.

"The government has made a decision to earmark 24.7 billion rubles ($809m) over the next three years for the start of the full-blown construction of the Vostochny cosmodrome," Mr Putin said.

Vostochny means "eastern" in Russian.

The head of Russia's federal space agency, Roscosmos Anatoly Perminov, said that up to 30,000 specialists would build the new space launch facility.

He also noted that it will be smaller than Baikonur, which Russia rents from Kazakhstan.
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Magnify

Nazi Germany: Himmler's Efforts to Turn Sand Into Gold

Allan Hall
The Telegraph
Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:27 UTC
Image
© The TelegraphSS chief Heinrich Himmler
SS chief Heinrich Himmler set up a secret unit in the Dachau concentration camp after becoming convinced he could turn sand into gold, a book has claimed.

His personal alchemist was a man named Karl Malchus who convinced Himmler he could make the metal.

Gold was vital for the Nazi regime in Germany to use to buy armaments and technology from abroad. When Himmler was approached by the scientist in 1937, after the regime had been in power for four years.

The book, Hilter's Alchemists - The Secret Attempts to Manufacture Gold in Dachau, by academic Helmut Werner, is the first account of this extraordinary confidence trick pulled on one of the most murderous individuals who ever lived.

Mr Werner, who has written previous works on the history of alchemy, said it was possible that Malchus himself may have been working for British intelligence when he received the go-ahead to begin his bizarre quest in a barracks at Dachau in 1938.
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Sherlock

Grave of Hitler's Would-Be Assassin Discovered

Allan Hall
The Telegraph
Tue, 20 Jul 2010 08:07 UTC
Image
© Rex FeaturesCount Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg in March 1944
The grave of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the man who failed to kill Adolf Hitler, may have been discovered in a wood in Germany.

Stauffenberg and other co-conspirators were summarily executed after a bomb the army officer planted at Hitler's east Prussian HQ failed to kill him on July 20,1944.

The plot to kill him and overthrow the Nazi state called Unternehmen Walküre (Operation Valkyrie), which was made into a film starring Tom Cruise as the doomed nobleman, was hatched by disillusioned army officers who knew Germany had no chance of winning the war and who were disgusted by atrocities they witnessed on the eastern front.

Stauffenberg and several others were shot dead in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, the army HQ in the centre of Berlin, in the hours following the coup attempt. Their last resting place was never found until now.
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Sherlock

Russia: Bolshevik Mass Grave Found in St. Petersburg


The Telegraph
Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:39 UTC
Image
© The TelegraphSt Petersburg: archaeologists have found a Bolshevik-era graveyard in the city's Peter and Paul Fortress
Archeologists have uncovered the site of Bolshevik-era executions and mass graves at St Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress.

The remains of over 80 bodies were found shot through the head in six mass graves dating to after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

The graves were discovered when archeological digs began this summer in Russia amid restoration work, said Dmitry Masliakov, museum spokesman.

"Six mass graves with the remains of over 80 bodies were found by archeologists during a dig on the grounds of the Peter and Paul Fortress since June," he said.

It was not immediately clear when the victims had lost their lives.
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Sherlock

US: Wooden "Stonehenge" Emerges From Prehistoric Ohio


National Geographic News
Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00 UTC
Image
© Bob RiordanLimestone-embedded clay floors surround postholes during a Moorehead Circle excavation July 8.
Timber circles, like U.K. monument, aligned to summer solstice, study reveals.

Just northeast of Cincinnati, Ohio, a sort of wooden Stonehenge is slowly emerging as archaeologists unearth increasing evidence of a 2,000-year-old ceremonial site.

Among their latest finds: Like Stonehenge, the Ohio timber circles were likely used to mark astronomical events such as the summer solstice.

Formally called Moorehead Circle but nicknamed "Woodhenge" by non-archaeologists, the site was once a leafless forest of wooden posts. Laid out in a peculiar pattern of concentric, but incomplete, rings, the site is about 200 feet (57 meters) wide.

Today only rock-filled postholes remain, surrounded by the enigmatic earthworks of Fort Ancient State Memorial. Some are thousands of feet long and all were built by Indians of the pre-agricultural Hopewell culture, the dominant culture in midwestern and eastern North America from about A.D. 1 to 900.
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Magnify

"Lost" Languages To Be Resurrected By Computers?

Tim Hornyak
National Geographic News
Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00 UTC
Image
© Regina BarzilayA sample of Ugaritic script on a gift-shop replica.
New program can translate ancient Biblical script.

A new computer program has quickly deciphered a written language last used in Biblical times - possibly opening the door to "resurrecting" ancient texts that are no longer understood, scientists announced last week.

Created by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the program automatically translates written Ugaritic, which consists of dots and wedge-shaped stylus marks on clay tablets. The script was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria.

Written examples of this "lost language" were discovered by archaeologists excavating the port city of Ugarit in the late 1920s. It took until 1932 for language specialists to decode the writing. Since then, the script has helped shed light on ancient Israelite culture and Biblical texts.

Using no more computing power than that of a high-end laptop, the new program compared symbol and word frequencies and patterns in Ugaritic with those of a known language, in this case, the closely related Hebrew.
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Sun

Sunspot AR1089 Crackling With B- and C-class Eruptions


Spaceweather.com
Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:27 UTC
On July 19th, a region of high magnetic activity rotated over the sun's southeastern limb. Extreme UV telescopes on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded these plumes of hot plasma heralding the approach:
Image
© SDO

White-light images of the emerging region subsequently revealed the dark cores of a large and complex sunspot, newly numbered AR1089.

Update July 20 at 1400 UT: The sunspot is now growing even larger. It has a restless magnetic field that is crackling with B- and C-class eruptions, as shown in these movies from SDO. Readers with solar telescopes are encouraged to monitor the region as it turns to face Earth.
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Meteor

WISE mission misleads public with confusing comet stats


Cosmic Tusk
Sun, 18 Jul 2010 06:40 UTC
Image
In my day work I am no stranger to government bureaucracies and "programs" manipulating information about their activities until it suits them to do otherwise. The WISE mission is no different.

In March of this year David Shiga wrote an obviously informed article revealing early results of the WISE mission (below). Six weeks into WISE's work, someone revealed to Shiga (I don't think it is press release material, but prove me wrong) that 16 NEO's had been identified, and strangely, these objects were in comet-like inclined orbits (making them comets). Then, this week, six month later, we get an update from the JPL mission team reporting a total of 15 new "comets" have been found, and 25,000 new "asteroids."

What happened to the original 16 objects with inclined orbits? Are they now just lumped in with asteroids? How many of the "asteroids" orbits are inclined (making them comets)?.

The WISE mission is massaging, or least showing no consistency, in their use of the terms comet and asteroid in their press releases or private communication with the media. I am sure the public will able to sort this out in six more months as promised in the JPL press release. But the opaque and clumsy treatment of this important quasi-public information in the popular press in the meantime is disappointing.

I would love for a reader or two to provide insight and clarification regarding these matters. I do not, for instance, monitor or quite understand the Minor Planet Center. Perhaps all this info is being fed to "Harvard" and WISE feels no responsibility to elaborate in a press releases regarding the finer points of astronomical nomenclature. Or, maybe you sense the same manipulation-without-explanation I do...
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Evil Rays

Secret sub tech hints at spooks' TEMPEST-busting bugs

Lewis Page
The Register
Mon, 19 Jul 2010 03:52 UTC
hitech gear
© The RegisterThrough glass, submarine hulls... maybe through Faraday cages

'Other UK gov parties' wanted details suppressed

Farnborough British boffins have devloped a cunning new method of transmitting high bandwidth data - plus power - through tough solid barriers such as submarine hulls or tank armour. The tech is being touted as a way of adding modifications to subs or armoured vehicles cheaply, but it seems that there are also other, highly secret, government applications.
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Meteor

Congress Proposes Commission to Study Asteroid Impact Threat

Leonard David
SPACE.com
Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:09 UTC
Image
© NASA/Don DavisArtistic view of a disastrous asteroid impact with early Earth. On one hand, the annual probability of the Earth being struck by a large asteroid or comet is extremely small. On the other hand, the consequences of such a collision are so great more attention is being paid to assess the nature of the threat and prepare to deal with it.
Lawmakers are paying new attention to how best to shield Earth from a bad day - getting whacked by an asteroid or comet that has our planet in its cross-hairs.

A new bill introduced to Congress proposes establishing a government-sponsored commission to study the threat of a major space rock collision with Earth and how prepared we are - as a country and a planet - to face such a danger.

There is a growing choir of concern regarding Near Earth Objects, or NEOs - spotting them and dealing with any Earth-threatening gatecrashers.

While the annual probability of the Earth being struck by a huge asteroid or comet is small, the consequences of such a collision are so calamitous that it is prudent to appraise the nature of the threat and prepare to deal with it, experts say. [Gallery: Holes in the Earth]

Last month, Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R - CA) introduced the new bill before Congress, H.R. 5587, titled: "To establish a United States Commission on Planetary Defense and for other purposes."

The bill has been referred to the Committee on Science and Technology, on which Rohrabacher serves as a member. Both sides of the aisle are now looking at the commission idea.

Comment: For additional in-depth information see Laura Knight-Jadczyk's Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls.

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