Science & TechnologyS


Bulb

Medieval child's brain to unlock human thought processes

Peter Allen
The Telegraph
Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:51 UTC
The almost perfectly preserved brain of a medieval toddler who died 800 years ago is set to provide ground-breaking information into human thought processes.

The brain was found mummified inside a wooden coffin in boggy soil close to Quimper, in Brittany, before being placed in formalin solution.

The boy, who was around 18 months old, appeared to have died of a skull fracture before his head was placed in a leather envelope, and then on a pillow in the 13th Century.
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Brick Wall

Wiping Out Graffiti? Here's an App for That

Jim Walsh and Dennis Wagner
USA Today
Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:46 UTC
Graffiti coverup
© Michael Schennum, The Arizona RepublicJoe Bender spray-paints over graffiti at a convenience store in Avondale, Ariz. The city has struggled for years with graffiti and next month will enlist residents to download new software and help.
The old school practice of American graffiti may have met its match in some high-tech prevention programs designed to spot, report and remove the blight from city and private property.

The latest weapon comes in the form of an iPhone application, developed by a Los Angeles company, that will allow cities to catalog graffiti, dispatch cleanup crews and provide key evidence to police.

The software application lets citizens or government officials photograph graffiti with an iPhone and send the image to the company's databases. The location of the graffiti is automatically marked using the phone's GPS capabilities. An electronic work order is created and, in minutes, a technician is sent with matching paint to cover up the graffiti. The images are catalogued and mapped so police can track down suspects and build a stronger case.
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Meteor

Future Shock From Gliese 710

Kelly Beatty
Sky & Telescope
Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:31 UTC
P
Image
© Don DavisThe Oort Cloud, which envelops our solar system with perhaps trillions of icy objects, extends to perhaps 5 trillion miles (50,000 astronomical units) from the Sun.
urveyors of doom often look to the heavens for their protagonists. During the 1980s, we were briefly captivated by Nemesis, a supposed companion of the Sun that triggered a death-dealing rain of comets every 26 million years. During the 1990s we endured wild speculations about Nibiru, which managed somehow not to destroy Earth in 2003.

Now there's a new threat - but unlike Nemesis and Nibiru, this one's real. It's called Gliese 710 (pronounced GLEE-zuh), an obscure, 10th-magnitude orange dwarf star situated about 63 light-years away in the constellation Serpens. Astronomers first took note of this modest star about a decade ago, when Joan García-Sánchez (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and others found, based on positional observations from the Hipparcos satellite, that in roughly 1½ million years Gliese 710 should pass about 1.3 light-years from the Sun.
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Info

New statistical method for genetic studies could cut computation time from years to hours

Wileen Wong Kromhout
University of California - Los Angeles
Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:47 UTC
In the ongoing quest to identify the genetic factors involved in disease, scientists have increasingly turned to genome-wide association studies, or GWAS, which enable the scanning of up to a million genetic markers in thousands of individuals.

These studies generally compare the frequency of genetic variants between two groups - those with a particular disease and healthy individuals. Differences in the frequency of a given variant suggest the variant may be involved in the disease.
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Pharoah

A Blue Mystery

Diana Lutz
Red Orbit
Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:39 UTC
Image
© Colin A. Hope/ Monash UniversityPottery decorated in a distinctive pale blue color was in vogue in New Kingdom Egypt, particularly during the reign of Amenhotep III and Ramesses II.
Sometimes a professional favor takes you down an interesting side street

Jennifer Smith, PhD, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was belly crawling her way to the end of a long, narrow tunnel carved in the rock at a desert oasis by Egyptians who lived in the time of the pharaohs.

"I was crawling along when suddenly I felt stabbed in the chest," she says. "I looked down and saw that I was pressing against the broken end of a long bone. That freaked me out because at first I thought I was crawling over bodies, but I looked up and saw a sheep skull not too far away, so I calmed down. At least the bones weren't human."
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Magnify

How Cells Protect Themselves from Cancer


ScienceDaily
Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00 UTC
Cells have two different protection programs to safeguard them from getting out of control under stress and from dividing without stopping and developing cancer. Until now, researchers assumed that these protective systems were prompted separately from each other. Now for the first time, using an animal model for lymphoma, cancer researchers of the Max Delbrück Center (MDC) Berlin-Buch and the Charité -- University Hospital Berlin in Germany have shown that these two protection programs work together through an interaction with normal immune cells to prevent tumors.

The findings of Dr. Maurice Reimann and his colleagues in the research group led by Professor Clemens Schmitt may be of fundamental importance in the fight against cancer. The research appears in the journal Cancer Cell.

Researchers have known for some time that -- paradoxically -- oncogenes themselves can activate these cell protection programs in an early developmental stage of the disease. This may explain why some tumors take decades to develop until the outbreak of the disease. The Myc oncogene triggers apoptosis (programmed cell death), inducing damaged cells to commit suicide in order to protect the organism as a whole. By means of chemotherapy, physicians activate this protection program to treat cancer.
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Meteor

Orange Dwarf Star Set to Smash into The Solar System


Technology Review
Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:54 UTC
Gliese 710
© NASAGliese 710
Gliese 710 should arrive sometime within the next 1.5 million years

A new set of star velocity data indicates that Gliese 710 has an 86 percent chance of ploughing into the Solar System within the next 1.5 million years.

The Solar System is surrounded by thousands of stars, but until recently it wasn't at all clear where they were all heading.

In 1997, however, astronomers published the Hipparcos Catalogue giving detailed position and velocity measurements of some 100,000 stars in our neighbourhood, all gathered by the European Space Agency's Hipparcos spacecraft. It's fair to say that the Hipparcos data has revolutionised our understanding of the 'hood.

In particular, this data allowed astronomers to work out which stars we'd been closer to in the past and which we will meet in the future. It turns out that 156 stars fall into this category and that the Sun has a close encounter with another star (meaning an approach within 1 parsec) every 2 million years or so.

Comment: Yes everyone, keep calm. Another article of of the "Relax! Anything bad that might happen to the Big Blue Marble is a long way off'." variety.

Perhaps not? Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls

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Telescope

Super Supernova: White Dwarf Star System Exceeds Mass Limit


Space Daily / SPX
Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:49 UTC
Image
© High-Z Supernova Search Team, HST, NASACosmologists use Type Ia supernovae, like the one visible in the lower left corner of this galaxy, to explore the past and future expansion of the universe and the nature of dark energy.
An international team led by Yale University has, for the first time, measured the mass of a type of supernova thought to belong to a unique subclass and confirmed that it surpasses what was believed to be an upper mass limit. Their findings, which appear online and will be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal, could affect the way cosmologists measure the expansion of the universe.

Cosmologists use Type Ia supernovae-the violent explosions of dead cores of stars called white dwarfs-as a kind of cosmic ruler to measure distances to the supernovae's host galaxies and, as such, to understand the past and future expansion of the universe and explore the nature of dark energy.

Until recently, it was thought that white dwarfs could not exceed what is known as the Chandrasekhar limit, a critical mass
equaling about 1.4 times that of the Sun, before exploding in a supernova. This uniform limit is a key tool in measuring distances to supernovae.

Since 2003, four supernovae have been discovered that were so bright, cosmologists wondered whether their white dwarfs had surpassed the Chandrasekhar limit. These supernovae have been dubbed the "super-Chandrasekhar" supernovae.
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Blackbox

Simulations Solve A 20-Year-Old Riddle


Space Daily / SPX
Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:43 UTC
Image
© Peters, et al. 2010This is a simulated observation of a massive star viewed along the plane of the disk. This visualization of dust emission traces the density and temperature of the gas cloud that surrounds the star. The regions that are currently ionized (in red) and have been ionized in the past (blue structures) show how the nebula flickers.
The birth of the most massive stars - those ten to a hundred times the mass of the Sun - has posed an astrophysical riddle for decades. Massive stars are dense enough to fuse hydrogen while they're still gathering material from the gas cloud, so it was a mystery why their brilliant radiation does not heat the infalling gas and blow it away.

New simulations by researchers affiliated with the University of Heidelberg, American Museum of Natural History, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics show that as the gas cloud collapses, it forms dense filamentary structures that absorb the star's radiation when it passes through them.

A result is that the surrounding heated nebula flickers like a candle flame. The research is published in the current issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

"To form a massive star, you need massive amounts of gas," says Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, a co-author and curator in the Department of Astrophysics at the Museum. "Gravity draws that gas into filaments that feed the hungry baby stars."
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Telescope

Planck Sees Tapestry Of Cold Dust


Space Daily / ESA
Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:35 UTC
Image
© ESA and the HFI Consortium, IRASThe image spans about 50 degrees of the sky. It is a three-colour combination constructed from Planck's two highest frequency channels (557 and 857 GHz, corresponding to wavelengths of 540 and 350 micrometres), and an image at the shorter wavelength of 100 micrometres made by the IRAS satellite. This combination visualises dust temperature very effectively: red corresponds to temperatures as cold as 10 degrees above absolute zero, and white to those of a few tens of degrees. Overall, the image shows local dust structures within 500 light-years of the Sun.
Giant filaments of cold dust stretching through our Galaxy are revealed in a new image from ESA's Planck satellite. Analysing these structures could help to determine the forces that shape our Galaxy and trigger star formation.

Planck is principally designed to study the biggest mysteries of cosmology. How did the Universe form? How did the galaxies form? This new image extends the range of its investigations into the cold dust structures of our own Galaxy.

The image shows the filamentary structure of dust in the solar neighbourhood - within about 500 light-years of the Sun. The local filaments are connected to the Milky Way, which is the pink horizontal feature near the bottom of the image. Here, the emission is coming from much further away, across the disc of our Galaxy.

The image has been colour coded to discern different temperatures of dust. White-pink tones show dust of a few tens of degrees above absolute zero, whereas the deeper colours are dust at around -261 degrees C, only about 12 degrees above absolute zero. The warmer dust is concentrated into the plane of the Galaxy whereas the dust suspended above and below is cooler.

"What makes these structures have these particular shapes is not well understood," says Jan Tauber, ESA Project Scientist for Planck. The denser parts are called molecular clouds while the more diffuse parts are 'cirrus'. They consist of both dust and gas, although the gas does not show up directly in this image.
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