Science & TechnologyS


Fish

Prussian Blue Salt Linked to Origin of Life


ScienceDaily
Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:00 UTC
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© Nagem RThis is Prussian blue. This salt could cause substances essential for life.
A team of researchers from the Astrobiology Centre (INTA-CSIC) has shown that hydrogen cyanide, urea and other substances considered essential to the formation of the most basic biological molecules can be obtained from the salt Prussian blue. In order to carry out this study, published in the journal Chemistry & Biodiversity, the scientists recreated the chemical conditions of the early Earth.

"We have shown that when Prussian blue is dissolved in ammoniac solutions it produces hydrogen cyanide, a substance that could have played a fundamental role in the creation of the first bio-organic molecules, as well as other precursors to the origin of life, such as urea, dimethylhydantoin and lactic acid," Marta Ruiz Bermejo, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Astrobiology Centre (CSIC-INTA), said.

Urea is considered to be an important reagent in synthesising pyrimidines (the derivatives of which form part of the nucleic acids DNA and RNA), and it has been suggested that hydantoins could be the precursors of peptides and amino acids (the components of proteins), while lactic acid is also of biological interest because, along with malic acid, it can play a role in electron donor-recipient systems.
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'Rock-Breathing' Bacteria Could Generate Electricity and Clean Up Oil Spills


ScienceDaily
Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00 UTC
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© University of East AngliaA discovery by scientists at the University of East Anglia could contribute to the development of systems that use domestic or agricultural waste to generate clean electricity.
A discovery by scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) could contribute to the development of systems that use domestic or agricultural waste to generate clean electricity.

Recently published by the scientific journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the researchers have demonstrated for the first time the mechanism by which some bacteria survive by 'breathing rocks'.

The findings could be applied to help in the development of new microbe-based technologies such as fuel cells, or 'bio-batteries', powered by animal or human waste, and agents to clean up areas polluted by oil or uranium.

"This is an exciting advance in our understanding of bacterial processes in the Earth's sub-surfaces," said Prof David Richardson, of UEA's School of Biological Sciences, who is leading the project.
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Sherlock

4,000-Year-Old-Year-Old Flowers Found at Bronze Age Dig


BBC News
Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:57 UTC
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© University of GlasgowArchaeologists are excited by the flowerhead discovery
For the first time ever there is proof that pre-historic people placed bunches of flowers in the grave when they buried their dead, experts have said.

Archaeologists have discovered a bunch of meadowsweet blossoms in a Bronze Age grave at Forteviot, south of Perth.

The find is reported in the journal British Archaeology, out this week.

Pollen found in earlier digs had been thought to have come from honey, or the alcoholic drink mead but this find may finally rule that theory out.

Dr Kenneth Brophy, from the University of Glasgow, said the flowers "don't look very much. Just about three or four millimetres across."
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Meteor

Absence of Evidence for a Meteorite Impact Event 13,000 Years Ago


ScienceDaily
Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:46 UTC
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© iStockphoto/Frank Van Den BerghGreenland
An international team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa has found no evidence supporting an extraterrestrial impact event at the onset of the Younger Dryas approximately 13,000 years ago.

The Younger Dryas is an abrupt cooling event in Earth's history. It coincided with the extinction of many large mammals including the woolly mammoth, the saber toothed jaguar and many sloths. This cooling period is generally considered to be the result of the complex global climate system, possibly spurred on by a reduction or slowdown of the thermohaline circulation in North America. This paradigm was challenged two years ago by a group of researchers that reported finding high iridium concentrations in terrestrial sediments dated during this time period, which led them to theorise that an impact event was instead the instigator of this climate shift.

A team led by François Paquay, a Doctoral graduate student in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) decided to also investigate this theory, to add more evidence to what they considered a conceptually appealing theory. However, not only were they unable to replicate the results found by the other researchers, but additional lines of evidence failed to support an impact theory for the onset of the Younger Dryas.
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Meteor

Kansas scientists probe mysterious possible comet strikes on Earth

Brendan M. Lynch
University of Kansas
Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:25 UTC
An investigation by the University of Kansas' Adrian Melott and colleagues reveals a promising new method of detecting past comet strikes upon Earth and gauging their frequency

It's the stuff of a Hollywood disaster epic: A comet plunges from outer space into the Earth's atmosphere, splitting the sky with a devastating shock wave that flattens forests and shakes the countryside.

But this isn't a disaster movie plotline.

"Comet impacts might be much more frequent than we expect," said Adrian Melott, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas. "There's a lot of interest in the rate of impact events upon the Earth. We really don't know the rate very well because most craters end up being destroyed by erosion or the comets go into the ocean and we don't know that they're there. We really don't have a good handle on the rate of impacts on the Earth."
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Sun

Theorists propose a new way to shine -- and a new kind of star

Kevin Mayhood
Case Western Reserve University
Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:22 UTC
Dying, for stars, has just gotten more complicated.

For some stellar objects, the final phase before or instead of collapsing into a black hole may be what a group of physicists is calling an electroweak star.

Glenn Starkman, a professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University, together with former graduate students and post-docs De-Chang Dai and Dejan Stojkovic, now at the State University of New York in Buffalo, and Arthur Lue, at MIT's Lincoln Lab, offer a description of the structure of an electroweak star in a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters and posted online at http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.0520.
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Sun

New planet discoveries suggest low-mass planets are common around nearby star

Tim Stephens
University of California - Santa Cruz
Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:17 UTC
An international team of planet hunters has discovered as many as six low-mass planets around two nearby Sun-like stars, including two "super-Earths" with masses 5 and 7.5 times the mass of Earth. The researchers, led by Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said the two "super-Earths" are the first ones found around Sun-like stars.

"These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away," said Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC.

The team found the new planet systems by combining data gathered at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) in New South Wales, Australia. Two papers describing the new planets have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
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Meteor

Infrared space telescope launched from California

Steve Gorman, Dan Whitcomb and Cynthia Osterman
Reuters
Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:26 UTC
NASA's new infrared space telescope was launched into orbit on Monday on a 10-month mission expected to reveal previously unseen objects ranging from near-Earth asteroids to some of the most distant galaxies in the cosmos.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, was carried into a polar orbit 326 miles above Earth by a Delta II rocket that lifted off before dawn from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California.

"All systems are looking good, and we are on our way to seeing the entire sky better than ever before," said William Irace, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
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Magnify

ClimateGate: A closer look at some of the 'tricks' by the email authors

David Rose
Mail Online
Sun, 13 Dec 2009 01:49 UTC
The claim was both simple and terrifying: that temperatures on planet Earth are now 'likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years'. As its authors from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) must have expected, it made headlines around the world.

Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts. In the words of one, David Rind from the US space agency Nasa, it 'looks like there were years around 1000AD that could have been just as warm'.
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Mystery Volcano May Have Triggered Mini Ice Age


National Public Radio
Sat, 12 Dec 2009 09:20 UTC
Scientists say evidence in the ice of Antarctica and Greenland shows a volcanic eruption, probably near the equator, contributed to global cooling early in the 19th century.

Global warming may be making some people nervous now, but from 1810 to 1819, people worried because the Earth was colder than usual.

For an entire decade, the Earth cooled almost a full degree Fahrenheit. In fact, 1816 was known as the year without a summer. And until recently, scientists weren't quite sure why everyone was shivering.

The chill of 1816 has long been blamed on an Indonesian volcano called Tambora, which erupted the year before. But no one could figure out why the years before Tambora's eruption were also colder than usual.
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