Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Evidence Suggests Chinese Civilization Even More Ancient


People's Daily
Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:53 UTC
Objects from the Taosi ruins in Shanxi Province that suggest Chinese civilization began around 4200 B.C., 500 years earlier than scholars had previously believed, will be displayed in the Capital Museum from July 29 to Oct. 10.

The Capital Museum and the Archaeology Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences will hold an archaeological exhibition containing the major achievements of the Archaeology Institute in the past 60 years and 70 percent of the content will be exhibited to the public for the first time.

It is generally believed that Chinese civilization began with the Xia Dynasty.

However, recent archaeological discoveries at the Taosi ruins in Xiangfen County, Shanxi Province suggest the elements that form a civilization, including written characters, bronze ware and cities, all emerged as early as the Yao Dynasty.
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Sherlock

Footprint Fossils Analyzed for Ancient Human Gait

Zahra Hirji
Discovery News
Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:33 UTC
Image
© Suzi Rosenberg/Flickr
Out in the Kenyan desert, a trail of extremely old footprints are etched into sedimentary rock -- a memory of early humans and how they moved.

Created around 1.5 million years ago, these are the oldest footprints that look like those made by modern humans. A team of scientists, including Brian Richmond from George Washington University, discovered these precious fossilized prints in dried mud in 2009.

Now Richmond is working on comparing the gait and foot structure of modern humans to the collection of ancient footprints.

As Richmond told NPR in an interview about his work, these footprints provide rare insight into understanding the evolution of human locomotion.
"A fossilized footprint is basically fossilized behavior," Richmond said. 'It shows you what the individual did 1.5 million years ago that instant in time." And what do those prints tell Richmond? "Sure enough, they were walking with a long stride, they had an arch in the foot the way we have."
These adaptations -- long legs and arches in our feet -- represent major differences between us and our distant primate relatives including gorillas, chimps and bonobos.
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Control Panel

Quantum Time Machine "Allows Paradox-Free Time Travel"

Tom Chivers
The Telegraph
Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:09 UTC
Image
© Univeral StudiosHow the quantum time machine may look. Or, possibly, a still from Back to the Future.
Quantum physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe it is possible to create a time machine which could affect the past without creating a "grandfather paradox."

Scientists have for some years been able to 'teleport' quantum states from one place to another. Now Seth Lloyd and his MIT team say that, using the same principles and a further strange quantum effect known as 'post-selection', it should be possible to do the same backwards in time. Lloyd told the Technology Review: "It is possible for particles (and, in principle, people) to tunnel from the future to the past."

Post-selection is a vital part of the nascent science of quantum computing. In traditional computing, if a user needs to determine which set of variables in an equation leads to the answer being true, the computer must try every combination until it hits upon one that works. In quantum computing, due to the weird parallel behavior of subatomic particles, it seems to be possible to simplify the procedure by running all possible variations simultaneously, and selecting only the combinations that make the answer true.

Professor Lloyd and his team say that, by combining teleportation and post-selection, it would be possible to carry out the quantum teleportation effect in reverse; that is, to decide after the teleportation what the quantum state must have been before it. This works as post-selection allows you to dictate which quantum states can be teleported, limiting what state it can have been in before the teleportation. The state of the particle post-teleportation has therefore, in effect, traveled back in time.
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Laptop

We're running out of internet addresses

John D. Sutter
CNN
Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:59 UTC
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© AFP/Getty ImagesExperts warn we may run out of internet addresses within a year.

Don't panic, but we're running out of internet addresses.

Not domain names -- those website names that you see at the top of this page and which always start with some semblance of "http://" and "www."

We've got plenty of those.

But, according to statements from prominent internet thinkers this week, we may run out of internet protocol -- or IP -- addresses in less than a year.
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Radar

Boffins Develop Greenhouse Invisible to Night-Vision Goggles

Lewis Page
The Register
Thu, 22 Jul 2010 04:03 UTC
'Glass cloak' would show up on thermal imagers, though

Boffins in the States say they have designed a "glass cloak" which renders objects within it invisible in the infrared spectrum.

Prof Elena Semouchkina and her colleagues developed the "cloak", which reportedly bends micron wavelengths around its interior. Micron-length waves are in the near infrared, the part of the electromagnetic spectrum used by ordinary night-vision goggles.

Previous invisibility cloak research has tended to focus on metallic "metamaterials", but Semouchkina and her colleagues' design calls for magnetic resonator metamaterial made of chalcogenide dielectric glass.
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Info

"Fresh" Crater Found in Egypt; Changes Impact Risk?

Andrew Fazekas
National Geographic News
Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:19 UTC
Kamil Crater
© Museo Nazionale dell'Antartide Università di SienaGeophysicists work in the newfound Kamil crater in an undated picture.
A small impact crater discovered in the Egyptian desert could change estimates for impact hazards to our planet, according to a new study.

One of the best preserved craters yet found on Earth, the Kamil crater was initially discovered in February during a survey of satellite images on Google Earth. Researchers think the crater formed within the past couple thousand years.

The Italian-Egyptian team that found the crater in pictures recently visited and studied the 147-foot-wide (45-meter-wide), 52-foot-deep (16-meter-deep) hole. The team also collected thousands of pieces of the space rock that littered the surrounding desert.

Based on their calculations, the team thinks that a 4.2-foot-wide (1.3-meter-wide) solid iron meteor weighing 2,267 to 4,535 pounds (5,000 to 10,000 kilograms) smashed into the desert - nearly intact - at speeds exceeding 2.1 miles (3.5 kilometers) a second.

There are no hard numbers for how many meteors this size might currently be on a collision course with Earth, but scientists think the potential threats could be in the tens of thousands.
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Question

Sister monument to Stonehenge may have been found

Raphael G. Satter
The Associated Press
Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:21 UTC
Stonehenge
© Dave Caulkin, APThis is a Sept. 15, 2004. file photo of tourists looking at The Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in England. Scientists scouring the area around Stonehenge said Thursday July 22, 2010 they have uncovered the foundations of a second circular structure only a few hundred meters (yards) from the world famous monument.
Scientists scouring the area around Stonehenge said Thursday they have uncovered a circular structure only a few hundred meters (yards) from the world famous monument.

There's some debate about what exactly has been found. The survey team which uncovered the structure said it could be the foundation for a circle of freestanding pieces of timber, a wooden version of Stonehenge.

But Tim Darvill, a professor of archaeology at Bournemouth University in southern England, expressed skepticism, saying he believed it was more likely a barrow, or prehistoric tomb.

Darvill did say that the circle was one of an expanding number of discoveries being made around Stonehenge which "really shows how much there is still to learn and how extensive the site really was."

"In its day Stonehenge was at the center of the largest ceremonial center in Europe," he said.

The stonehenge that is visible today is thought to have been completed about 3,500 years ago, although the first earthwork henge on the site was probably built more than 5,000 yeas ago.
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Telescope

Telescope Finds Elusive Buckyballs in Space for First Time


PhysOrg
Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:50 UTC
Image
© NASA/JPL-CaltechNASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has at last found buckyballs in space, as illustrated by this artist's conception.
Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered carbon molecules, known as "buckyballs," in space for the first time. Buckyballs are soccer-ball-shaped molecules that were first observed in a laboratory 25 years ago.

They are named for their resemblance to architect Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, which have interlocking circles on the surface of a partial sphere. Buckyballs were thought to float around in space, but had escaped detection until now.

"We found what are now the largest molecules known to exist in space," said astronomer Jan Cami of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. "We are particularly excited because they have unique properties that make them important players for all sorts of physical and chemical processes going on in space." Cami has authored a paper about the discovery that will appear online Thursday in the journal Science.

Buckyballs are made of 60 carbon atoms arranged in three-dimensional, spherical structures. Their alternating patterns of hexagons and pentagons match a typical black-and-white soccer ball. The research team also found the more elongated relative of buckyballs, known as C70, for the first time in space. These molecules consist of 70 carbon atoms and are shaped more like an oval rugby ball. Both types of molecules belong to a class known officially as buckminsterfullerenes, or fullerenes.
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Sun

Astronomers Find A 300 Solar Mass Star


Space Daily / SPX
Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:37 UTC
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© ESO/M. KornmesserUsing a combination of instruments on ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have discovered the most massive stars to date, some weighing at birth more than 300 times the mass of the Sun, or twice as much as the currently accepted limit of 150 solar masses. This artist's impression shows the relative sizes of young stars, from the smallest "red dwarfs", weighing in at about 0.1 solar masses, through low mass "yellow dwarfs" such as the Sun, to massive "blue dwarf" stars weighing eight times more than the Sun, as well as the 300 solar mass star named R136a1.
Using a combination of instruments on ESO's Very Large Telescope, a UK-led international team of astronomers have discovered the most massive stars to date, one which at birth had more than 300 times the mass of the Sun, twice as much as the currently accepted limit.

The existence of these monsters - millions of times more luminous than the Sun, losing mass through very powerful winds - may provide an answer to the question "how massive can stars be?" The new results appear in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A team of astronomers led by Paul Crowther, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Sheffield, used ESO's Very Large Telescope, as well as archival data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, to study two young clusters of stars, NGC 3603 and RMC 136a in detail. NGC 3603 is a cosmic factory where stars form frantically from the nebula's extended clouds of gas and dust, located 22,000 light-years away from the Sun (eso1005).

RMC 136a (more often nicknamed R136) is another cluster of young, massive and hot stars, which is located inside the Tarantula Nebula, in one of our neighboring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud, 165,000 light-years away (eso0613).
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Grey Alien

Aliens Have Been Trying to Contact Us by Cosmic Twitter, Scientists Claim

Laura Roberts
The Telegraph
Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:30 UTC
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© Universal Pictures/The TelegraphET could be contacting us by cosmic Twitter
Aliens may have been trying to contact us by communicating in a manner similar to Twitter, scientists have claimed.

ET is more likely to be sending out short, directed messages than continuous signals beamed in all directions, experts said.

''This approach is more like Twitter and less like War and Peace,'' said Californian physicist Dr James Benford, president of Microwave Sciences Inc.

He and twin brother Gregory, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Irvine, looked at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) from the aliens' point of view.

They concluded that Seti scientists may have been taking the wrong approach for the past five decades.
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