Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Huge Impact Crater Discovered on Planet Mercury


Space
Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:17 UTC
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© NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Smithsonian Institution/Carnegie Institution of WashingtonThe Rembrandt impact basin was discovered by MESSENGER during its second flyby of Mercury in October 2008. Images show that the Rembrandt basin is remarkably well preserved.
New observations from NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft reveal about 30 percent of the planet Mercury that has never been seen up close before. A giant crater and evidence of ancient volcanoes are among the findings.

The photos show a giant impact crater that spans a length equivalent to the distance between Washington, D.C., and Boston.

MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging spacecraft) made its second close-approach flyby of Mercury in October 2008, after being launched in 2004. The spacecraft is the first to visit the diminutive planet since the Mariner 10 spacecraft's sojourn in the 1970s.

Until recently, scientists say the closest planet to the sun remained the least understood of the four terrestrial planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. For a long time it was thought to be very similar to Earth's moon in composition, since both worlds have a similar gray, pockmarked appearance.
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Pharoah

Ancient Egypt Brought To Life With Virtual Model Of Historic Temple Complex


Science Daily
Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:25 UTC
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© UCLA/ETCDigital recreation shows what Karnak probably looked like in ancient times.
For the past two years, a team of UCLA Egyptologists, digital modelers, web designers, staff and students has been building a three-dimensional virtual-reality model of the ancient Egyptian religious site known as Karnak, one of the largest temple complexes ever constructed.

The result is Digital Karnak, a high-tech model that runs in real time and allows users to navigate 2,000 years of history at the popular ancient Egyptian tourist site near modern-day Luxor, where generations of pharaohs constructed temples, chapels, obelisks, sphinxes, shrines and other sacred structures beginning in the 20th century B.C.

Developed by UCLA's Experiential Technologies Center - which has helped pioneer the digital reconstruction of historical sites, including the innovative Rome Reborn, released in 2006 - the Karnak model and a host of additional digital resources are now available for educators, students, scholars and the public to explore for free HERE.
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Info

Native Americans descended from a single ancestral group, DNA study confirms


Science Daily
Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:07 UTC
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© Kari Britt Schroeder/UC DavisA distinct DNA signature was found among all but one of the populations shown as points 32 to 53 on this map. (The Fox tribe, point 48, was the exception. But DNA samples of only 2 people were tested, too few to provide a valid result.) The signature was absent in all Asian groups sampled, points 1-32.
For two decades, researchers have been using a growing volume of genetic data to debate whether ancestors of Native Americans emigrated to the New World in one wave or successive waves, or from one ancestral Asian population or a number of different populations.

Now, after painstakingly comparing DNA samples from people in dozens of modern-day Native American and Eurasian groups, an international team of scientists thinks it can put the matter to rest: virtually without exception, the new evidence supports the single ancestral population theory.

"Our work provides strong evidence that, in general, Native Americans are more closely related to each other than to any other existing Asian populations, except those that live at the very edge of the Bering Strait," said Kari Britt Schroeder, a lecturer at the University of California, Davis, and the first author on the paper describing the study.
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Blackbox

Unknown internet 1: Who controls the internet?

Michael Brooks
New Scientist
Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:19 UTC
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© Colin Anderson / Photographer's Choice / GettyDoes any one country or organisation control the internet?
The official answer is no one, but it is a half-truth that few swallow. If all nations are equal online, the US is more equal than others.

Not that it is an easy issue to define. The internet is, essentially, a group of protocols by which computers communicate, and innumerable servers and cables, most of which are in private hands. However, in terms of influence, the overwhelming balance of power lies with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, based in Marina Del Rey, California.

ICANN is a not-for-profit organisation that regulates online addresses, known as domain names, and their suffixes, such as ".com" and ".org". Since ICANN reports to the US government's Department of Commerce, the domain name process is effectively overseen by the US government. China, Russia and Europe have all expressed concern at this situation because it means the US has leverage over the global coordination of the internet. "It has a role that is different from the role of all other governments," says Massimiliano Minisci, a regional manager at ICANN. "That's a concern around the world."
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Blackbox

Unknown internet 2: Could the net become self-aware?


New Scientist
Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:22 UTC
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© ImageSource / GettyThe internet's network structure is similar to that of the human brain.
Yes, if we play our cards right - or wrong, depending on your perspective.

In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet's complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. "The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind," says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. "It might already have a degree of consciousness".

Not that it will necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans: it is unlikely to be wondering who it is, for instance. To Francis Heylighen, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium, consciousness is merely a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain's processes get the most resources. "Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control... than a jump to a wholly different level," Heylighen says.
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Clock

How your search queries can predict the future

Jim Giles
Newscientist
Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:17 UTC
Real-time web search - which scours only the latest updates to services like Twitter - is currently generating quite a buzz because it can provide a glimpse of what people around the world are thinking or doing at any given moment. Interest in this kind of search is so great that, according to recent leaks, Google is considering buying Twitter.
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Attention

Flashback CDC to mix avian, human flu viruses in pandemic study

Robert Roos
CIDRAP
Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:55 UTC
One of the worst fears of infectious disease experts is that the H5N1 avian influenza virus now circulating in parts of Asia will combine with a human-adapted flu virus to create a deadly new flu virus that could spread around the world.

That could happen, scientists predict, if someone who is already infected with an ordinary flu virus contracts the avian virus at the same time. The avian virus has already caused at least 48 confirmed human illness cases in Asia, of which 35 have been fatal. The virus has shown little ability to spread from person to person, but the fear is that a hybrid could combine the killing power of the avian virus with the transmissibility of human flu viruses.

Now, rather than waiting to see if nature spawns such a hybrid, US scientists are planning to try to breed one themselves - in the name of preparedness.
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Rocket

Video: Launch of world's largest amateur rocket

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:34 UTC

This 11-metre-tall, 750-kilogram rocket took off on Saturday from a field outside of Price, Maryland


A 1/10th-scale model of a NASA Saturn V rocket launched successfully on Saturday, becoming what is thought to be the largest amateur rocket ever to take off and be safely recovered. The feat could herald the arrival of the first amateur rockets to reach orbit.

The 11-metre-tall, 750-kilogram rocket took off on Saturday from a field outside of Price, Maryland, near the eastern shore. It flew for roughly 20 seconds to an altitude of more than 1300 metres before segmenting and falling back to Earth beneath multiple parachutes.

The rocket, built by rocket hobbyist Steve Eves, replicates the look of the Saturn V rocket used to loft Apollo crew capsules into space. But its interior boasts newer electronics and significantly less fuel.

A rocket only slightly larger than the scale model actually made it into orbit around the Earth nearly 40 years ago. In 1971, the 13-metre-long British Black Arrow rocket lofted a small science satellite called Prospero into orbit, says engineer Henry Spencer, an amateur space historian based in Toronto, Ontario.
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Satellite

Experts urge US to share data on satellite orbits

David Shiga
New Scientist
Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:25 UTC
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© ESAThe US Air Force tracks more than 19,000 pieces of debris larger than 10 centimetres long. Here, satellite sizes have been exaggerated for visibility in this artist's impression of the environment in low-Earth orbit.
The US government's reluctance thus far to release precise data about the satellites it is tracking is hampering efforts to prevent collisions in space, a satellite industry executive told a congressional committee on Tuesday.

The US tracks and predicts the orbits of the world's satellites and thousands of bits of space junk as small as 10 centimetres across, using radar and telescopes on the ground. But it closely guards its most precise data, and routinely releases only lower-precision data to satellite companies and other countries.

That makes it difficult for satellite operators to predict a collision with another satellite or piece of space junk, said Richard DalBello of satellite operator Intelsat General in testimony to a congressional hearing on Tuesday about space debris and safety.

To help avoid accidents like the one in February in which a Russian communications satellite collided with an American one, some commercial operators are pooling information on the positions and orbits of their satellites, based on their own tracking data.
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Saturn

Salt in Enceladus geyser points to liquid ocean


New Scientist
Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:19 UTC
The ice plumes that bloom above Saturn's icy moon Enceladus are almost certainly rooted in a subsurface sea of liquid water.

The Cassini spacecraft flew through a plume on 9 October 2008 and measured the molecular weight of chemicals in the ice. Frank Postberg of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, and colleagues, found traces of sodium in the form of salt and sodium bicarbonate. The chemicals would have originated in the rocky core of Enceladus, so to reach a plume they must have leached from the core via liquid water. Observations from Earth in 2007 spotted no sign of sodium, casting doubt on such a subsurface sea.

Although the salt could have been leached out by an ancient ocean which since froze solid, that freezing process would concentrate most of the salt very far from the surface of the moon's ice, says Julie Castillo of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "It is easier to imagine that the salts are present in a liquid ocean below the surface," she says. "That's why this detection, if confirmed, is very important."
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