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Combined observations with six spacecraft have allowed scientists to monitor in detail the impact of extreme solar events on the Earth. The study, based on data from four Cluster and two Double Star spacecraft, demonstrated that the typical ion composition observed in the near-Earth environment was drastically modified by extreme solar events and that the magnetosphere became extremely compressed. In situ observations of such changes provide vital information for models of our near-Earth environment where commercial and military spacecraft orbit.
© Chris And Monique Fallows / Apex Images Cc / OSF / PhotolibraryA great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, feeds on a whale carcass at Seal Island, False Bay, South Africa
A team led by Dana Ehret, of the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, unearthed the unique specimen in southern Peru's Pisco Formation, which during the Pliocene, the period around 2 to 5 million years ago, was an ocean.
© ESAHerschel (left) and Planck (right) could revolutionise our understanding of the universe.
The Herschel Space Observatory is an infrared telescope almost four times as big as its NASA rival (see New Scientist, 4 April, p 32), Spitzer. Planck will map the aftermath of the big bang with a precision that NASA's scientists can only dream of.
Separately, each is a major mission. Together, they constitute a landmark in astrophysics. The probes could revolutionise our understanding of the cosmos. If everything goes to plan, Herschel and Plank will dominate space science for at least five years. But if the launch goes wrong...
With science budgets shrinking, launching two such important missions on the same rocket smacks of madness, especially given that the launcher, an Ariane 5 rocket, has suffered a couple of high-profile and expensive failures. In 1996, a computer bug caused the loss of ESA's Cluster mission, which was rebuilt at a cost of €315 million. In 2002, a commercial launch exploded, forcing ESA to delay its Rosetta mission and costing it a further €100 million.
© Diebold / Photographer's Choice / Getty
"But the fly in the ointment was that string theory allowed for, in principle, many universes," says Greene, who is a theoretical physicist at Columbia University in New York. In other words, string theory seems equally capable of describing universes very different from ours. Greene hoped that something in the theory would eventually rule out most of the possibilities and single out one of these universes as the real one: ours.
So far, it hasn't - though not for any lack of trying. As a result, string theorists are beginning to accept that their ambitions for the theory may have been misguided. Perhaps our universe is not the only one after all. Maybe string theory has been right all along.
Greene, certainly, has had a change of heart. "You walk along a number of pathways in physics far enough and you bang into the possibility that we are one universe of many," he says. "So what do you do? You smack yourself in the head and say, 'Ah, maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.' I have personally undergone a sort of transformation, where I am very warm to this possibility of there being many universes, and that we are in the one where we can survive."
© Ansgar WalkThe Arctic Poppy and other high-latitude flowers have parabolic shapes to focus sunlight on the reproductive parts at their centres. Physicist Freeman Dyson says such plants might evolve on other worlds as well.
"I would say the strategy in looking for life in the universe [should be] to look for what's detectable, not what's probable," he said on Saturday at a conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"We have a tendency among the theorists in this field to guess what's probable. In fact our guesses are likely to be wrong," Dyson said. "We never had as much imagination as nature."
He said spacecraft should hunt for signs of life on Jupiter's ice-covered moon Europa, since it would be detectable there.
© unknown
Scientists say all humans are the direct descendents of people living about 200,000 years ago in the homeland of the San people along the Namibia-South Africa border.
According to the report published in the journal Science Express, researchers found that nearly three-fourths of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to West Africa.
© unknown
Two teams of scientists from Cornell University and UC Berkeley have reportedly developed invisibility cloaks using a new technology that can hide objects across optical wavelengths.
Previous such "cloaks" had metals in their structure which resulted in imperfect cloaking due to loss of light.
However, the new technology is the first cloak built considered to be carpet-based, as it uses a dielectric - or insulating material - which absorbs far less light than previous invisibility cloaks designed using metals.
© Space.comTwo Supernova Births
With that observation, they became the first astronomers to catch a star in the act of exploding.
"For years we have dreamed of seeing a star just as it was exploding, but actually finding one is a once-in-a-lifetime, event," said Soderberg, a Hubble and Carnegie Princeton Fellow at Princeton University.
The discovery, detailed in the May 22 issue of the journal Nature, will shed light on the early stages of this violent stellar death, acting as a deciphering key or "Rosetta Stone" for supernova studies, as Soderberg puts it.
And analysis of the energy emitted by the new supernova, dubbed SN 2008D, could help astronomers better understand this explosive process and the properties of the stars that lead to it.
© Space.comA Supernova
That bright star isn't actually a star, at least not anymore. The brilliant point of light is the explosion of a star that has reached the end of its life, otherwise known as a supernova.
Supernovas can briefly outshine entire galaxies and radiate more energy than our sun will in its entire lifetime. They're also the primary source of heavy elements in the universe.
On average, a supernova will occur about once every 50 years in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way. Put another way, a star explodes every second or so somewhere in the universe.
Exactly how a star dies depends in part on its mass. Our sun, for example, doesn't have enough mass to explode as a supernova (though the news for Earth still isn't good, because once the sun runs out of its nuclear fuel, perhaps in a couple billion years, it will swell into a red giant that will likely vaporize our world, before gradually cooling into a white dwarf).
© The IndependantForensic artist Richard Neave used skull and jawbone fragments found in a cave to build this likeness of an early European
The artist's reconstruction - a face that could be male or female - is based on the partial skull and jawbone found in a cave where bears were known to hibernate. The facial features indicate the close affinity of these early Europeans to their immediate African ancestors, although it was still not possible to determine the person's sex.
