Science & TechnologyS


Igloo

Frozen in Time: Ancient Tools Found Under Arctic Ice


The Daily Star
Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:25 UTC
Ice Tool
© The Daily StarA 340-year-old bow reconstructed from several fragments found near melted patches of ice in the Mackenzie Mountains in the Northwest Territories of Canada.
Warming temperatures are melting patches of ice that have been in place for thousands of years in the mountains of the Canadian High Arctic and in turn revealing a treasure trove of ancient hunting tools.

Ice patches result from layers of annual snow that, until recently, remained frozen all year. As Earth's temperature has warmed in recent decades due to the accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, some of the ice patches have begun to melt away, sometimes revealing ancient artifacts to the surprise of archaeologists.

"We're just like children opening Christmas presents. I kind of pinch myself," said Tom Andrews, an archaeologist with the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, Northern Territories, Canada, and lead researcher on the International Polar Year Ice Patch Study.

Ice patch archeology is a recent phenomenon that began in Yukon. In 1997, sheep hunters discovered a 4,300-year-old dart shaft in caribou dung that had become exposed as the ice receded. Scientists who investigated the site found layers of caribou dung buried between annual deposits of ice. They also discovered a repository of well-preserved artifacts.

Andrews first became aware of the importance of ice patches when word about the Yukon find started leaking out. "We began wondering if we had the same phenomenon here," Andrews said.
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Rocket

NASA Team Captures Hayabusa Spacecraft Reentry- YouTube Video


NASA
Sun, 13 Jun 2010 23:30 UTC
A group of astronomers from NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and other organizations had a front row seat to observe the Hayabusa spacecraft's fiery plunge into Earth's atmosphere. The team flew aboard NASA's DC-8 airborne laboratory, packed with cameras and other imaging instruments, to capture the high-speed re-entry over an unpopulated area of central Australia on June 13, 2010. The Japanese spacecraft completed its seven-year, 1.25 billion mile journey to return a sample of the asteroid Itokawa.

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Meteor

The End of The World as We Know It

Chris Impey
The Independent, UK
Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:01 UTC
Impact
© GETTY IMAGESCrash landing: every 100 million years, a rock the size of a small asteroid slams into the Earth, causing earthquakes, tidal waves, and killing all large land animals.
Apocalyptic thought has a tradition that dates to the Persian prophet Zoroaster in the 14th century BC. Recently, anxiety has grown over the prediction of the end of the world in the Mayan calendar.

It's true that the Mayan odometer will hit zeros on 21 December 2012, as it reaches the end of a 394-year cycle called a baktun. But this baktun is part of a larger 8,000-year cycle called a pictun, and there's no evidence that anything astronomically untoward will happen as the current baktun slides into the next. However, that hasn't stopped the feverish speculating that sells books and cinema tickets.

What kind of catastrophe would it take to end the world? Astronomical intruders provide a potentially serious threat. Impacts can be caused by stray rubble from the Asteroid Belt and the rocky snowballs that travel in highly elliptical orbits in the comet cloud. There are many fewer large bits of debris than small bits, so the interval between large impacts is much longer than the interval between small impacts.
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Magnify

Good Behavior, Religiousness May Be Partly Genetic


ScienceDaily
Fri, 06 Apr 2007 21:05 UTC
A new study in Journal of Personality shows that selfless and social behavior is not purely a product of environment, specifically religious environment. After studying the behavior of adult twins, researchers found that, while altruistic behavior and religiousness tended to appear together, the correlation was due to both environmental and genetic factors.

According to study author Laura Koenig, the popular idea that religious individuals are more social and giving because of the behavioral mandates set for them is incorrect. "This study shows that religiousness occurs with these behaviors also because there are genes that predispose them to it."

"There is, of course, no specific gene for religiousness, but individuals do have biological predispositions to behave in certain ways," says Koenig. "The use of twins in the current study allowed for an investigation of the genetic and environmental influences on this type of behavior."
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Cut

Boldly going nowhere: Nasa ends plan to put man back on Moon

Jacqui Goddard
The Times
Sun, 13 Jun 2010 19:49 UTC
Nasa has begun to wind down construction of the rockets and spacecraft that were to have taken astronauts back to the Moon - effectively dismantling the US human spaceflight programme despite a congressional ban on its doing so.

Legislators have accused President Obama's Administration of contriving to slip the termination of the Constellation programme through the back door to avoid a battle on Capitol Hill.

Constellation aimed to build upon what was arguably America's greatest technological achievement, the first lunar landing of 1969, by launching new expeditions to the Moon and to Mars and worlds beyond. Mr Obama proposed in February that it should be scrapped because it was "over budget, behind schedule and lacking in innovation", but he has met opposition in Congress, which has yet to approve his plan.The head of Nasa, Major-General Charlie Bolden - an Obama appointee - has now written to aerospace contractors telling them to cut back immediately on Constellation-related projects costing almost $1 billion (£690 million), to comply with regulations requiring them to budget for possible contract termination costs.
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Info

Biophotonics Lights Medicine's Path

Kathlyn Stone
Flesh and Stone
Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:22 UTC
Biophotonics_1
© ICFOLasers are one of the light sources used by biophotonics researchers.
Have you heard of biophotonics or photomedicine? If not, you're not alone, since the discipline has a rather low profile despite its wide use in oncology, dermatology, ophthalmology, surgery and cardiology.

Light is at the heart of biophotonics. Biophotonics is the convergence of biology and photonics - science and technology focused on generating, manipulating and detecting photons, which are the quantum units of light. Biophotonics employs applying a light source, such as a microscope light, a laser or radiation, to a tissue or cell.

One simple application of biophotonics you've probably seen is a light-emitting device, called a pulse oximeter, which is placed on a finger to ascertain a person's arterial oxygen saturation and cardiac rhythm.
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Info

River Deltas Hint at Ancient Martian Ocean

Jon Cartwright
Nature News
Sun, 13 Jun 2010 14:32 UTC
Mars Ocean
© B.Hynek/University of ColoradoA huge ocean may have covered almost one-third of the Martian surface.
Planetary geologists in the United States have analysed data that suggest Mars was once home to a huge ocean of water, covering nearly one-third of its surface. Their evidence, a ring of dry river deltas and valleys all at a similar elevation, adds weight to the idea that the red planet once supported an Earth-like water cycle.

Hints that an ocean once occupied the northern lowlands of ancient Mars first arose in the late 1980s. Scientists examining pictures of the surface claimed to recognize extensive shorelines and vast networks of river valleys and outflow channels feeding in the same direction. Other researchers used thermal physics to imply that such networks could only have been carved by a complete water cycle, fuelled by one or more huge bodies of water.

Not all evidence has supported the idea of a Martian ocean, however. In the late 1990s, researchers studying high-resolution images of the proposed shoreline regions could not find any of the erosion and sediment normally associated with an ocean's edge. Nor have they since found the telltale coastal landforms seen on Earth, such as spits and wave-deposited ridges.
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Sun

Sunspot 1081's M1-Class Solar Flare


Space Weather
Sat, 12 Jun 2010 22:10 UTC
Today, June 12th at 0055 UT, new sunspot 1081 unleashed an impulsive M1-class solar flare. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the blast in high-resolution:
Image
© NASA

The explosion hurled a billion-ton coronal mass ejection (CME) off the sun's western limb; the cloud will probably not hit Earth. The explosion also produced a Type II radio burst. "Although the Sun was setting here in New Mexico, I was able to record the burst at 28 MHz and 24 MHz," says amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft. "Here is an audio file. The slow swoosh is radio noise from the sun!"
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Meteor

Comet McNaught C/2009 R1


Space Weather
Sat, 12 Jun 2010 22:19 UTC
One wonders... Did the inhabitants of galaxy NGC 891 duck when Comet McNaught flew past the edge-on spiral on the morning of June 8th? Mike O'Connor and Tristan Dilapo took this picture of the cosmic close encounter from Colden, New York:

Image
© Mike O'Connor and Tristan Dilapo
"The comet was only 10 degrees above the horizon," says O'Connor. "Nevertheless, we got a good picture using a 12-inch telescope and an SBIG ST9-E camera."

And, no, the denizens of that distant galaxy did not flinch, flee, duck or take notice in any way. NGC 891 is 30 million light years away, far removed from the willowy tail of Comet McNaught.

We Earthlings are having the true close encounter. Comet McNaught (C/2009 R1) is gliding through the inner solar system, due to approach our planet only 100 million miles away on June 15th and 16th. The approaching comet looks great in small telescopes, and may yet become a naked-eye object before the end of the month. Because this is Comet McNaught's first visit, predictions of future brightness are necessarily uncertain; amateur astronomers should be alert for the unexpected.
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Chalkboard

Radiation-soaking metamaterial puts black in the shade

Jeff Hecht
New Scientist
Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:30 UTC
Image
© U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Andy DunawaySoon even harder to spot
Fashionistas take note: this material really does deserve to be labelled the new black - it absorbs virtually all the light that hits it.

This "blacker than black" stuff is an example of a class of substances known as metamaterials, which exhibit optical properties not normally found in nature.

Metamaterials consist of a regular array of two or more tiny components, each smaller than the wavelengths of the light they interact with. It is this array-like internal structure that gives them their unusual properties.

Evgenii Narimanov of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, realised that it should be possible to design a metamaterial with the right internal structure to absorb virtually all the electromagnetic radiation in a particular range. An object made of such a material would effectively be perfectly black. By contrast, ordinary black objects always reflect a little light.

In collaboration with Narimanov, Mikhail Noginov and colleagues at Norfolk State University in Virginia have now created such a perfectly black material. It consists of silver wires 35 nanometres in diameter, embedded in 1-centimetre squares of aluminium oxide, 51 micrometres thick.
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