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Can Bacteria Make You Smarter?


Science Daily
Tue, 25 May 2010 18:47 UTC
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© iStockphoto/Jennifer Surrena-MacDonaldToddler plays in the dirt.
Exposure to specific bacteria in the environment, already believed to have antidepressant qualities, could increase learning behavior, according to research presented at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego.
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Telescope

New Image Shows Damage On Silent Phoenix Mars Lander


marsdaily.com
Tue, 25 May 2010 18:46 UTC
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© NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of ArizonaTwo images of the Phoenix Mars lander taken from Martian orbit in 2008 and 2010. The 2008 lander image (left) shows two relatively blue spots on either side corresponding to the spacecraft's clean circular solar panels. In the 2010 (right) image scientists see a dark shadow that could be the lander body and eastern solar panel, but no shadow from the western solar panel.
NASA 's Phoenix Mars Lander has ended operations after repeated attempts to contact the spacecraft were unsuccessful. A new image transmitted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows signs of severe ice damage to the lander's solar panels.

"The Phoenix spacecraft succeeded in its investigations and exceeded its planned lifetime," said Fuk Li, manager of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Although its work is finished, analysis of information from Phoenix's science activities will continue for some time to come."
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Sun

A Solar Blast


Space Weather
Tue, 25 May 2010 10:08 UTC
A magnetic filament on the sun erupted yesterday, May 24th, and the blast hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) in the general direction of Earth. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the action around the blast site in 10xHDTV resolution:

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© NASA
Shortly after the eruption, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spotted a billion-ton CME racing away from the sun: movie. NOAA forecasters say there is a 35% chance of geomagnetic activity on May 27th when the cloud delivers a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.
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Rocket

Secret Space Plane


Space Weather
Tue, 25 May 2010 10:04 UTC
NASA's space shuttle program may be winding down, but the US Air Force's is just getting started. On April 22nd, the USAF launched an unmanned mini-shuttle from Cape Canaveral on a secret mission widely thought to involve reconnaissance. The X-37B can now be seen gliding through the night sky shining about as brightly as the stars of the Big Dipper. On Sunday night, Gary O. photographed it streaking over the treetops of his home in Fort Davis, Texas:
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© Gary O., Fort Davis, TX

"This was my first chance to photograph the X-37B," says Gary. "It was easy to see. I estimate its magnitude at about +2.8."

The whereabouts of the X-37B were unknown until May 20th when amateur satellite watchers Greg Roberts of Cape Town, South Africa, and Kevin Fetter of Brockville, Canada, independently spotted it. Another satellite sleuth, Ted Molczan of Toronto, Canada, combined their observations to determine the space plane's orbit. With this information in hand, Fetter was able to find the X-37B again the next night; here it is on May 21st passing the 3rd-magnitude star Sadalsuud in Aquarius.
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Rocket

Engineers Diagnosing Voyager 2 Data System -- Update


Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Mon, 24 May 2010 21:55 UTC
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© NASA/JPL-Caltech. This artist's rendering depicts NASAs Voyager 2 spacecraft as it studies the outer limits of the heliosphere - a magnetic 'bubble' around the solar system that is created by the solar wind.
Engineers successfully reset a computer onboard Voyager 2 that caused an unexpected data pattern shift, and the spacecraft resumed sending properly formatted science data back to Earth on Sunday, May 23. Mission managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., had been operating the spacecraft in engineering mode since May 6.
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Telescope

Soul Nebula's Heart Caught on Camera

Zoe Macintosh
Space.com
Mon, 24 May 2010 21:38 UTC
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© NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE TeamNASA's WISE infrared space observatory mission team released this mosaic of the Soul Nebula (a.k.a. the Embryo Nebula, IC 1848, or W5) on April 2, 2010. The Soul Nebula is an open cluster of stars surrounded by a cloud of dust and gas over 150 light-years across and located about 6,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia, near the Heart Nebula.
The wispy tendrils of gas and dust that make up the heart of the distant Soul Nebula stand out in a recent photograph from a NASA space telescope.

At 150 light-years across, the Soul Nebula is vast cloud of dust and gas that surrounds a cluster of stars about 6,500 light-years from Earth in constellation Cassiopeia. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), an infrared space telescope, took the new Soul Nebula photo earlier this year and it was released in April.
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Pharoah

Sahara cave may hold clues to dawn of Egypt

Patrick Werr
Reuters
Mon, 24 May 2010 21:18 UTC
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© REUTERS/StringerView of a wall at the "Cave of the Beasts" is seen in Gilf al-Kebir some 550 miles (900 km) southwest of Cairo, near Egypt's south-west border with Libya and Sudan in this undated photograph.
Cairo - Archaeologists are studying prehistoric rock drawings discovered in a remote cave in 2002, including dancing figures and strange headless beasts, as they seek new clues about the rise of Egyptian civilisation.

Amateur explorers stumbled across the cave, which includes 5,000 images painted or engraved into stone, in the vast, empty desert near Egypt's southwest border with Libya and Sudan.
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Laptop

Video Smutware Attack Returns to Facebook

John Leyden
The Register
Mon, 24 May 2010 11:37 UTC
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© Facebook
Of course I'm too security-conscious to fall for ooh look bewbs

Facebook users were hit for the second time in only a week by a video-themed malware attack last weekend.

The latest assault involved the posting of a fake video to profiles entitled "distracting beach babes" that appeared under the guise of a post by one of a targeted user's friends on the social networking site. The messages came together with a picture of a movie thumbnail featuring a woman in a bikini.

This thumbnail linked to a bogus Facebook application touting adware disguised as a supposed video codec needed to play non-existent grumble flick material. The bogus application, if successfully installed, posts the same lure to contacts of an infected mark, restarting the exploit cycle.
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Newspaper

Nicolaus Copernicus Given a Hero's Burial More Than 450 Years After His Death

Vanessa Gera
The Associated Press
Sun, 23 May 2010 13:00 UTC
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© Wikimedia CommonsNicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero on Saturday, nearly 500 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave.

His burial in a tomb in the cathedral where he once served as a church canon and doctor indicates how far the church has come in making peace with the scientist whose revolutionary theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun helped usher in the modern scientific age.

Copernicus, who lived from 1473 to 1543, died as a little-known astronomer working in a remote part of northern Poland, far from Europe's centers of learning. He had spent years laboring in his free time developing his theory, which was later condemned as heretical by the church because it removed Earth and humanity from their central position in the universe.
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Blackbox

Did Supernovas Shatter Life's Mirror?

Marcus Chown
New Scientist
Wed, 19 May 2010 12:00 UTC
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© Robert Mallozz/Marshall Space Flight CenterExplosive twist
Mr. Spock is dying. Fortunately for the crew of the USS Enterprise, the Spock in question is not the real one, but an evil mirror-image version created in a freak transporter malfunction. This Spock's back-to-front body can digest only right-handed amino acids; meanwhile, like all organic matter, the food around him is made of left-handed amino acids. He is starving in the midst of plenty.

This plot line from the 1970 novel Spock Must Die! - the first literary spin-off from the Star Trek TV series - highlights one of life's fundamental mysteries. Why does biology use only one of two mirror-image forms in which most complex molecules can occur? The latest pop at an answer weaves astrophysics, particle physics and biochemistry into a startling proposal: that the stellar explosions known as supernovae are to blame.

"It is an intriguing idea," says Daniel Glavin, an astrobiologist at the NASA Goddard Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. It is certainly a novel turn in this twistiest of tales: the story of how life came to be left-handed.
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