Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Venus Disappears During Meteor Shower


Space Daily
Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:28 UTC
A Venus-Moon conjunction.
© UnknownA Venus-Moon conjunction.
Picture this: It's 4:30 in the morning. You're up and out before the sun. Steam rises from your coffee cup, floating up to the sky where a silent meteor streaks through a crowd of stars. A few minutes later it happens again, and again. A meteor shower is underway.

One of the streaks leads to the eastern horizon. There, just above the tree line, Venus and the crescent Moon hover side by side, so close together they almost seem to touch. Suddenly, Venus wavers, winks, and disappears.

All of this is about to happen--for real. On Wednesday morning, April 22nd, Earth will pass through a stream of comet dust, giving rise to the annual Lyrid meteor shower. At the same time, the crescent Moon and Venus will converge for a close encounter in the eastern sky. Viewed from some parts of the world, the Moon will pass directly in front of Venus, causing Venus to vanish.
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Sun

Brown Dwarfs May Be Common In Our Galaxy


New Scientist
Sun, 19 Apr 2009 16:47 UTC
Failed stars may be more common than anyone thought. If so, it would change our idea of how stars form.

In 2007, a star near the centre of our galaxy appeared to brighten because another object had focused the star's light onto Earth. From the way the object bent the light, Andrew Gould of Ohio State University in Columbus and colleagues have now found that it is a brown dwarf - a "failed star" with too little mass to sustain the nuclear reactions that power stars.

Current estimates of how common brown dwarfs are suggest this finding is improbable - so either Gould struck lucky or brown dwarfs are more abundant than previously thought.
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Pharoah

Newgrange: Ireland's ancient answer to the pyramids

Laura Harrison McBride
Examiner.com
Thu, 09 Apr 2009 04:00 UTC
Image
© Sinead Downing photoNewgrange, Ireland: Neolithic spiritual site
For the ancient people of Ireland (and continuing until recent times, when Celtic Druidry was still practiced there by some), the separation between the living and a world beyond was not nearly as well defined as it is for us moderns. They sought every possible way to connect with the world beyond the physical world they toiled in, and with their ancestors and an eternal spirit. Ireland is, because of this, littered with Neolithic structures known as passage tombs, but likely incorporating both rituals of death, and rituals of rebirth. (Ireland has always been a land of spiritual seeking, up to and including the High Crosses developed in the early Christian era.)

Newgrange, the largest so-called passage tomb known, is one such magnificent structure, created about 5000 years ago. It exhibits the tomb qualities most often mentioned, but also the ritual and astronomical qualities that were also important to life in the Neolithic universe.
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Info

What Voyager's golden record tells ET about Earth

Maggie McKee
New Scientist
Sat, 18 Apr 2009 19:35 UTC
Image
© National Astronomy and Ionosphere CenterWhat would extraterrestrials make of this Voyager image?
Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, says any future messages sent to ET should reflect the human race as it really is - warts and all.

"One of the standard assumptions [about composing messages] is we should talk about what we all have in common; we should avoid controversy," he says. "My concern is that if we do that, our messages may be pretty brief and pretty boring."
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Bulb

Mirror Neurons Fire Better at Close Range

Lizzie Buchen
Wired
Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:31 UTC
Reaching out
A newly discovered type of brain cell may help us prep for social interactions.

The cells are a special type of "mirror neurons," which are thought to aid understanding of the actions and intentions of others. Mirror neurons fire both when you do something, like grab a bottle of wine, and when you watch another person do the same thing. Instead of carrying out a step-by-step reasoning process to figure out why a friend is grabbing a bottle of wine, we instantly understand what's going on inside his head because it's going on in our heads too.

Now, researchers have discovered some mirror neurons don't just care about what another individual is doing, they also care about how far away they're doing it, and, more importantly, whether there's potential for interaction.

"This was very surprising for us," said Antonino Casile of the University of Tübingen in Germany, co-author of the research, published in Science Thursday. "The current view about mirror neurons is that they might underlie action understanding. But the distance at which an action is performed plays no role in understanding what the others are doing."
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Bulb

U.S. scientist says tie up asteroids to protect Earth from strike


RIA Novosti
Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:33 UTC
If an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, the best way to avoid a global catastrophe could be to attach a long tether with a weight at the end to deflect its orbit, a U.S. scientist has suggested.

David French, a doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University, said that by attaching ballast and a tether to asteroids "you change the object's center of mass, effectively changing the object's orbit and allowing it to pass by the Earth, rather than impacting it."
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Info

Titanium reveals explosive origins of the solar system

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:55 UTC
Image
© NASAThe same ratio of two varieties of titanium has been found in a range of meteorites, hinting that the cloud of gas and dust that formed the solar system was well-mixed before the first solids formed.
The solar system emerged from a well-blended soup of dust and gas despite being cobbled together from the remains of multiple exploded stars, new meteorite measurements suggest.

Meteorites form a fossil record of the conditions that existed when they formed. By looking at the chemical makeup of some rocks, evidence has mounted in recent years that sun and the rest of the solar system formed from a cloud of debris blasted away from a number of supernovae.

But it is still unclear what that cloud - the solar nebula - looked like or how many stars might have been involved in the Sun's birth. Now, a team led by Martin Bizzarro of the Natural History Museum of Denmark has found one clue.

Bizzarro and colleagues measured the levels of titanium in meteorites from the moon and Mars as well as inclusions in some meteorites that are thought to be the oldest rocks in the solar system.
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Satellite

Kepler Spacecraft begins search for habitable exoplanets

Tariq Malik
Space.com
Thu, 16 Apr 2009 03:23 UTC
Alien Stars
© Space.com
The planet-seeking Kepler spacecraft has beamed home its first images of a patch of the sky where NASA hopes to find Earth-like planets circling distant, alien stars.

Some 14 million stars are estimated to lurk within the first views from Kepler, which NASA released Thursday. The images reveal a swath of stars between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra that fill an expansive area of our Milky Way galaxy which, when seen from Earth, is about the size of human hand held up against the night sky at arm's length.

"It's thrilling to see this treasure trove of stars," said William Borucki, Kepler's science principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "We expect to find hundreds of planets circling those stars, and for the first time, we can look for Earth-size planets in the habitable zones around other stars like the sun.
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Robot

The nearly invincible robotics industry

Hiawatha Bray
Boston.com
Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:48 UTC
Government orders buffering firms from downturn

The recession that's hammered the global economy appears to have spared the robot makers gathering in Boston this week. Executives at the RoboBusiness Conference & Expo at the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center said that demand for military robots, combined with the likely effects of President Obama's economic stimulus package, is helping to offset a slowdown in commercial orders and difficulties in obtaining bank financing.

"We almost didn't make it to the show because we've been so busy," said Will Pong, director of robotics for Segway Inc. in Bedford, N.H. "Orders are taking longer to close, but they're still closing."
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Ladybug

Females get along fine without males - in the world of tropical ants

Alastair Jamieson
Telegraph.co.uk
Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:35 UTC
female ant
The Mycocepurus smithii ant is the first known to be a male-free species

A type of tropical ant has dispensed with males altogether, according to scientists, and only the female of the species exists.

Experts have discovered a South American species that is exclusively female and reproduces asexually by cloning the queen.

Reproduction without sex is fairly common in the ant world, but the Mycocepurus smithii is the first known to be a male-free species. The phenomenon takes the stress out of finding a mate and may help keep the peace in colonies, the scientists believe.

Researchers were first drawn to Mycocepurus smithii by its skill at cultivating various different fungal crops for food but closer inspection raised questions about the ants' sex life.

Six separate tests on the ants failed to uncover any males, researchers led by Anna Himler at the University of Texas at Austin wrote in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society.
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