Science & TechnologyS


Satellite

Scientists Eye Debris After Satellite Collision

Marcia Dunn
The Associated Press
Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:19 UTC
Objects
© AP Photo/ESAThis image provided by the European Space Agency shows and artist impression of catalogued objects in low-Earth orbit viewed over the Equator.
Scientists are keeping a close eye on orbital debris created when two communications satellites - one American, the other Russian - smashed into each other hundreds of miles above the Earth.

NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the unprecedented crash and whether any other satellites or even the Hubble Space Telescope are threatened.

The collision, which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday, was the first high-speed impact between two intact spacecraft, NASA officials said.

"We knew this was going to happen eventually," said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA believes any risk to the international space station and its three astronauts is low. It orbits about 270 miles below the collision course.
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Magnify

Mexico City: Mass Grave May Be Aztec Resistance Fighters

Mark Stevenson
The Associated Press
Wed, 11 Feb 2009 10:00 UTC
Skeleton
© AP Photo/Gregory BullAn archeologist works over a skeleton at the site of a mass grave found in a ruined pyramid in Tlateloco neighborhood in Mexico City.
Archaeologists digging in a ruined pyramid in downtown Mexico City said Tuesday they found a mass grave that may hold the skeletal remains of the Aztec holdouts who fought conquistador Hernan Cortes.

The unusual burial holds the carefully arrayed skeletons of at least 49 adult Indians who were buried in the remains of a pyramid razed by the Spaniards during the 1521 conquest of the Aztec capital.

The pyramid complex, in the city's Tlatelolco square, was the site of the last Indian resistance to the Spaniards during the monthslong battle for the city.

Archaeologist Salvador Guilliem, the leader of the excavation for Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, said the Indians might have been killed during Cortes' war or during one of the uprisings that continued after the conquest.

Guilliem said many burials have been found at the site with the remains of Indians who died during epidemics that swept the Aztec capital in the years after the conquest and killed off much of the Indian population.

But those burials were mostly hurried, haphazard affairs in which remains were jumbled together in pits regardless of age or gender.
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Frog

New Foot-long Tapeworms Identified


LiveScience
Wed, 11 Feb 2009 22:30 UTC
Tapeworm
© Claire J. HealyThis is a scanning electron micrograph of the scolex (i.e., anterior attachment organ) of Rhinebothrium sp., a tapeworm in the new order Rhinebothriidea.
A major group of tapeworms, parasitic flatworms that can grow to more than 30 feet long in the digestive tracks of humans, fish and other animals while absorbing their nutrients, has been discovered by Canadian researchers.

The new tapeworm group, an order now dubbed Rhinebothriidea and that includes worms that parasitize stingrays and grow up to a foot long, was established as new to science by Claire J. Healy, a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and her colleagues.

Infection with a tapeworm is rare in the United States. People are often unaware they are infected, via an animal or water, but symptoms can include abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite and malnutrition. The treatment is a pill that kills the worm and helps the body expel it.
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Pharoah

Egypt opens 2,600-year-old sarcophagus with intact mummy - latest find in ancient necropolis

Katarina Kratovac
Associated Press
Thu, 12 Feb 2009 05:57 UTC
New Mummy
© Associated PressEgyptian laborers are seen by a shaft that leads to a burial chamber where eight revealed sarcophagi found inside a 26th Dynasty limestone sarcophagus along with other mummies at the ancient necropolis

Illuminated only by torches and camera lights, Egyptian laborers used crowbars and picks Wednesday to lift the lid off a 2,600-year-old limestone sarcophagus, exposing - for the first time since it was sealed in antiquity - a perfectly preserved mummy.

The mummy, wrapped in dark-stained canvas, is part of Egypt's latest archaeological discovery of a burial chamber 36 feet below ground at the ancient necropolis of Saqqara. The find, made three weeks ago, was publicly announced Monday and shown to reporters for the first time Wednesday.

Egypt's archaeology chief Zahi Hawass has dubbed it a "storeroom for mummies," because it houses eight wooden and limestone sarcophagi as well as at least two dozen mummies.

Hawass led a group of international media Wednesday into the burial chamber, supervising as one person at a time was lowered into the shaft, holding on to a rope-pulled winch turned by workers above ground.

"It's moments like these, seeing something for the first time, that hold all the passion of archaeology," Hawass said after the mummy was unveiled.
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Satellite

Big Satellites Collide 500 Miles Over Siberia

Bill Harwood
CBS News
Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:15 UTC
Cape Canaveral, Florida ― In an unprecedented space collision, a commercial Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite ran into each other Tuesday above northern Siberia, creating a cloud of wreckage, officials said today. The international space station does not appear to be threatened by the debris, they said, but it's not yet clear whether it poses a risk to any other military or civilian satellites.

"They collided at an altitude of 790 kilometers (491 miles) over northern Siberia Tuesday about noon Washington time," said Nicholas Johnson, NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "The U.S. space surveillance network detected a large number of debris from both objects."
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Info

Secret of gorillas' language unravelled

Jenny Haworth
Scotsman News
Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:40 UTC
Gorillas have a vast array of gestures with which they communicate, scientists have discovered.

From performing a pirouette to waving their arms about, gorillas use more than 100 different movements to communicate - more than any other mammal.

Gorillas may be our closest relatives, but to a human onlooker some of the actions seem bizarre.

Whereas it is unsurprising that a touch on the arm can be a signal to calm down or an invitation to have a cuddle, it would not be so easy to guess that a pirouette would be a warning that another gorilla should stop a particular action.
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Evil Rays

Not everyone cheers as Wi-Fi takes to the skies

Micheline Maynard
International Herald Tribune
Sun, 08 Feb 2009 23:19 UTC
For all the annoyance of being crammed into an aluminum tube at 35,000 feet with a bunch of strangers, air travel has offered one benefit: the ability to tell bosses and colleagues, "I'll be on a flight, so you won't be able to reach me."

So much for that excuse.

Wireless Internet service is starting to spread among airlines in the United States - Delta and American have installed it on more than a dozen planes each, and several other carriers are planning to test it.
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Blackbox

Deliberate confusion? Scientists losing war of words over climate change

Catherine Brahic
New Scientist
Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:48 UTC
Who understands the probabilities of climate change? Certainly not the general public, if psychological tests on volunteers in the US are to be believed.

The public, it seems, thinks climate scientists are less certain about their conclusions than they actually are. The results could explain why the minority views of "climate sceptics" get proportionally more attention from the general public than those of climate scientists.

Scientists are by their nature reluctant to express results as absolutely certain, and climatologists are no exception. Future projections based on climate models always come with error bars - an indication of how likely the data is to be accurate.
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Telescope

Meet the scoundrels of astronomy

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:21 UTC
Image
© Wikimedia CommonsNicolaus Reimers Baer ("Ursus") (1551-1600) Ursus incited a bitter controversy in 1588, when he published a geocentric model of the solar system (pictured) that looked quite similar to Tycho Brahe's. In both models, the planets orbited the Sun, while the Sun orbited the Earth.

History is littered with astronomers who doggedly pursued fame at the expense of the scientific method.

While researching a biographical encyclopaedia, Thomas Hockey of the University of Northern Iowa compiled a list of "really bad" astronomers. Some were combative, while others seem to have stolen ideas or manufactured data, infiltrating the astronomical community "like wolves among the sheep". Hockey discussed them last month at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
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Family

Y Chromosome and Surname Study Challenges Infidelity 'Myth'


PhysOrg
Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:37 UTC
Our surnames and genetic information are often strongly connected, according to a study funded by the Wellcome Trust.

The research, published this week in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, may help genealogists create more accurate family trees even when records are missing. It also suggests that the often quoted "one in ten" figure for children born through infidelity is unlikely to be true.

Dr Turi King and Professor Mark Jobling from the University of Leicester examined the Y chromosomes of over 1,600 unrelated men with forty surnames (including variations in spelling). Sons inherit both the Y chromosome and - generally - the surname from their fathers, unlike daughters, who do not carry this sex-specific chromosome and usually change their surname through marriage.

Hereditary surnames were introduced to Britain by the Normans at the time of the conquest. The practice of using hereditary surnames filtered down from Norman noble families to all classes of society so that by the fourteenth century people in many classes had surnames and by the sixteenth century it was rare not to have one.
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