Science & TechnologyS


Einstein

Will Time Travel Ultimately Prove to be Impossible?

Luke McKinney
Daily Galaxy
Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:13 UTC
Time Travel
© Unknown
In what must be the most touching and useful tribute to departed author Arthur C. Clarke ever attempted, a group of scientists authors are trying to dare time travel into existence. Sir Clarke famously stated that "when a [distinguished scientist] states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong". And a lot of distinguished scientists just told LiveScience "Time travel is absolutely impossible".

The authors, including Charles Liu (author of One Universe: At Home In The Cosmos), Brian Greene (of The Elegant Universe) and Michio Kaku (Hyperspace) float a raft of objections to trans-temporal travel. True to Clarke's statement, sometimes affectionately known as "Clarke's Law", each objection seems more like reason to expect time travel than rule it out. Professor Greene states that all time-travel theories operate at the very boundaries of known physics, and are therefore unlikely to work. As opposed to, say, the boundaries of our understanding being where new discoveries are made. As Sir Clarke said years ago: "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible".
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Telescope

Astronomers Unveiling Life's Cosmic Origins


Science Daily
Sat, 14 Feb 2009 18:32 UTC
Cosmic Chemistry Cycle
© Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSFThe Cosmic Chemistry Cycle.

Processes that laid the foundation for life on Earth -- star and planet formation and the production of complex organic molecules in interstellar space -- are yielding their secrets to astronomers armed with powerful new research tools, and even better tools soon will be available.

Astronomers described three important developments at a symposium on the "Cosmic Cradle of Life" at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago, IL.

In one development, a team of astrochemists released a major new resource for seeking complex interstellar molecules that are the precursors to life. The chemical data released by Anthony Remijan of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and his university colleagues is part of the Prebiotic Interstellar Molecule Survey, or PRIMOS, a project studying a star-forming region near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy.
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HAL9000

Microsoft posts bounty for worm creator

Maggie Shiels
BBC News
Sat, 14 Feb 2009 03:48 UTC
A reward of $250,000 (£172,000) has been offered by Microsoft to find who is behind the Downadup/Conficker virus.

Since it started circulating in October 2008 the Conficker worm has managed to infect millions of computers worldwide.

The software giant is offering the cash reward because it views the Conficker worm as a criminal attack.

"People who write this malware have to be held accountable," said George Stathakopulos, of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group.

He told BBC News the company was "not prepared to sit back and let this kind of activity go unchecked".

"Our message is very clear - whoever wrote this caused significant pain to our customers and we are sending a message that we will do everything we can to help with your arrest," said Mr Stathakopulos.
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Sherlock

High-tech Tests Allow Anthropologists To Track Ancient Hominids Across The Landscape


ScienceDaily
Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:09 UTC
Image
© Illustration courtesy of Walter Voigt/Lee Berger/Brett Hilton-BarberAn artist's representation of Paranthropus in southern Africa more than 1 million years ago.
Dazzling new scientific techniques are allowing archaeologists to track the movements and menus of extinct hominids through the seasons and years as they ate their way across the African landscape, helping to illuminate the evolution of human diets.

Piecing together relationships between the diets of hominids several million years ago to that of early and modern humans is allowing scientists to see how diet relates to the evolution of cognitive abilities, social structures, locomotion and even disease, said University of Colorado at Boulder anthropology Professor Matt Sponheimer. Sponheimer organized a session titled "The Evolution of Human Diets" at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting Feb. 12-15 in Chicago.
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Blackbox

Five mysteries of the universe

Michael Brooks
The Guardian
Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:13 UTC
Even today, there are scientific phenomena that defy explanation. If history is anything to go by, resolving these anomalies could lead to a great leap forward, so what are the greatest mysteries, and what scientific revolutions might they bring?

1 The missing universe

Everything in the universe is either mass or energy, but there's not enough of either. Scientists think 96% of the cosmos is missing. They have come up with names for the missing stuff - "dark energy" and "dark matter" - but that doesn't really tell us anything about them. And it's not as if they're not important: dark energy is continually creating new swaths of space and time, while dark matter appears to be holding all the galaxies together. No wonder cosmologists are searching for clues to their whereabouts.
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Info

Flashback Your DNA Is a Song: Scientists Use Music to Code Proteins

John Roach
National Geographic News
Fri, 21 Oct 2005 22:07 UTC
What are proteins? How are they structured? What's the difference between a protein in a human and the same protein in a lizard? Ask Mary Anne Clark these questions and she is likely to respond with an earful of music.

Clark is a biologist at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, and she's part of a growing field of science educators who use so-called protein music to help illustrate the basic structure of the building blocks of life.

All living things are made up of proteins. Each protein is a string of amino acids. There are 20 different amino acids, and each protein can consist of dozens to thousands of them.

Scientists write down these amino acid sequences as series of text letters. Clark and her colleagues assign musical notes to the different values of the amino acids in each sequence. The result is music in the form of "protein songs."
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Telescope

University of Hawaii's Power Grab of Sacred Mountain

Kealoha Pisciotta
Kahea
Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:12 UTC
Mauna Kea Summit
Mauna Kea is a sacred mountain and a unique desert alpine habitat for endangered Hawaiian plants and animals. Mauna Kea is protected by law as a conservation district and a Natural Area Reserve. These are public trust lands--Hawaiian lands--held by the state in trust for the people of Hawaii.

Yet, today Mauna Kea's public lands are being exploited by foreign nations, corporations, and the University of Hawaii, who are all seeking to profit from telescope construction on the summit at the expense of its unique natural habitat, pure drinking water, and sacred cultural resources. Dozens of telescope and support structures already cover the sacred summit--built without the consent of Native Hawaiians and local communities. Now, two more telescopes (and accompanying roads, parking lots, office buildings, and gift shops) are proposed for the sacred summit. One of them -- the Thirty Meter Telescope -- is slated for construction on the summit's last pristine peak. It is larger than all the current telescopes on the summit combined.
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Saturn

Space crash called "catastrophic," lots of debris

Vladimir Isachenkov
Associated Press
Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:19 UTC
Moscow - The crash of two satellites has generated an estimated tens of thousands of pieces of space junk that could circle Earth and threaten other satellites for the next 10,000 years, space experts said Friday.

One called the collision "a catastrophic event" that he hoped would force the new U.S. administration to address the issue of debris in space.

Russian Mission Control chief Vladimir Solovyov said Tuesday's smashup of a derelict Russian military satellite and a working U.S. Iridium commercial satellite occurred in the busiest part of near-Earth space - some 500 miles (800 kilometers) above Earth.
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Magnify

Molecular Motors in Cells Work Together, Study Shows


PhysOrg
Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:00 UTC
Even within cells, the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. Molecular motors, the little engines that power cell mobility and the ability of cells to transport internal cargo, work together and in close coordination, according to a new finding by researchers at the University of Virginia. The work could have implications for the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders.

"We found that molecular motors operate in an amazingly coordinated manner when moving an algal cell one way or the other," said Jeneva Laib, the lead author and an undergraduate biomedical engineering student at the University of Virginia. "This provides a new understanding of the ways cells move."

The finding appears online in the current issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Magnify

How Cells Handle Broken Chromosomes


PhysOrg
Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:00 UTC
After being recognized and initially processed by the cellular machinery, the broken chromosome is extensively scanned for homology and the break itself is later tethered to the nuclear envelope. Thus the researchers uncovered a surprising feature of how DNA strand breaks can be handled. Their unexpected findings have important implications for the understanding of DNA repair mechanisms. (Molecular Cell 33, February 13th, 2009)

The central molecule for life is DNA, which constitutes the genetic blueprint of our organism. However, this precious molecule is constantly threatened by miscellaneous damage sources. DNA damage is a cause of cancer development, degenerative diseases and aging. The most dangerous and lethal type of DNA-damage is the DNA double strand break (DSB). A single DSB is enough to kill a cell or cause chromosomal aberrations leading to cancer. Therefore, cells have evolved elaborate DNA repair systems that are fundamental for human health.

DSBs can be repaired by error-prone non-homologous end joining, a pathway in which the DSB ends are simply fused together again. The alternative repair pathway, called homologous recombination, is mostly error-free and needs homologous DNA sequences to guide repair. A vast amount of research, by many scientists around the world, has provided us with a detailed picture of how the DNA damage is recognized and finally repaired. However, so far little was known, how homologous sequences are found and how cells react when DNA breaks persist.

Now, scientists around Stefan Jentsch, head of the Department of Molecular Cell Biology, were able to shed light on these questions, as they report in the upcoming issue of Molecular Cell.
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