Science & TechnologyS


Fish

Tropical Turtle Fossil Found in Arctic


LiveScience
Sun, 01 Feb 2009 14:13 UTC
The last place scientists expected to find the fossil of a freshwater, tropical turtle was in the Arctic. But they did.

The discovery, detailed today in the journal Geology, suggests animals migrated from Asia to North America not around Alaska, as once thought, but directly across a freshwater sea floating atop the warm, salty Arctic Ocean. It also provides additional evidence that a rapid influx of carbon dioxide some 90 million years ago was the likely cause of a super-greenhouse effect that created extraordinary heat in the polar region.
Read More...
Sherlock

Legendary British Warship 'Found?'


BBC News
Sun, 01 Feb 2009 15:25 UTC
Victory
© BBC NewsAn artist's impression of how HMS Victory may have looked.
A US-based salvage firm is believed to have found remains from the wreck of a legendary British warship which sank in the English Channel in 1744.

Odyssey Marine Exploration is expected to announce on Monday that it has found HMS Victory, the forerunner of Nelson's famous flagship of the same name.

The valuables from the vessel, including brass cannons, could be worth millions of pounds, some experts say.
Read More...
Rocket

Columbia Disaster Remembered; Shuttle Future Uncertain

Steve Grzanich
WBBM Newsradio 780
Sun, 01 Feb 2009 13:51 UTC
Chicago, ILL-- As the nation marks the sixth anniversary of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, questions remain about the future of the space program now that there's a new president. There is particular concern about the aging fleet of orbiters and proposals to extend the life of the shuttle program beyond its planned retirement next year.
Read More...
Telescope

Mystery Of Twin Quasar Brightness Revealed


Science Daily
Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:30 UTC
Image
© Plataforma SINCThe researchers have confirmed that fluctuations in the brightness detected in image A were repeated 14 months later in Image B. If they had been caused by the gravity of planets or stars, the fluctuations in image A would not have been exactly replicated in image B.

Variations in the brightness of the Q0957+561 quasar, also known as the "twin quasar" due to its duplicated image on Earth, are intrinsic to the entity itself and not caused by the gravitational effects of possible planets or stars from a far away galaxy.

This is the conclusion of a study carried out by Spanish researchers resolving a mystery that has intrigued astronomers for the past 30 years.

The quasar Q0957+561, some 9 billion light years away in the Ursa Major constellation, was discovered in 1979 by an Anglo-American team. Since then scientists have managed to explain why two images are observed of the same object -separated by a little less than two thousandths of a degree in the sky-, but up until now had not been able to explain the origins of the "rapid" (lasting several months) variations in their brightness.
Read More...
Better Earth

Study of Astronomy a Must for Saving Our Planet


The Times of India
Sat, 31 Jan 2009 20:13 UTC
Addressing the importance of astronomy as a field of study, senior scientist Jayant Narlikar spoke about its role in development of science and its use to predict and protect the Earth from developments in the Universe.

He was speaking at the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) on Saturday during a lecture organised by the Mahrashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (MANS) on the occasion of International Year of Astronomy 2009.

"Astronomy helps create rules for science. Remote sensing devices, satellites, impact of gravity all these concepts would be impossible to understand without studying astronomy," Narlikar said.
Read More...
Sherlock

Earliest Chemical Warfare Felled Roman Fort

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:55 UTC
The Lone Persian
© Discovery newsThe Lone Persian

A cramped tunnel beneath a Middle Eastern fort might have produced the oldest evidence of chemical warfare, according to a CSI-style review of archival records.

Presented at the recent meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, the review focused on the dramatic remains of 20 Roman soldiers unearthed in the 1930s in the city of Dura-Europos, Syria.

Sitting on a cliff overlooking the Euphrates River, the Roman fort at Dura was the site of a violent siege by the powerful Persian Empire around 256 A.D.

No historical record of the battle exists, but archaeological remains have helped piece together the action.
Read More...
Magnify

Entangled Particles Face Sudden Death

Eric Bland
Discovery News
Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:29 UTC
entangled particles
© Discovery NewsPrepare for Sudden Death
Two particles can become entangled so completely that a change in one immediately affects the other, no matter how far away it is. Until now, scientists have assumed such a marriage would endure forever.

But in a paper published today in the journal Science, two physicists show that entangled particles can suddenly and irrevocably lose their connection, a phenomenon called Entanglement Sudden Death, or ESD.

"The degree of information entangled can disappear faster than the information itself," said Joseph Eberly, a physicist at the University of Rochester, who, along with Ting Yu, co-authored the paper. "It's completely non-classical physics."
Read More...
Display

Google Creates Momentary Panic by Labeling All Sites Harmful


PhysOrg
Sat, 31 Jan 2009 18:23 UTC
Google
© Google
The search engine Google sparked online panic Saturday when a glitch in its security program temporarily prevented users from visiting any websites in search results.

Between 1430 and 1525 GMT, all search results were marked as harmful and users received the message: "Warning! This site may harm your computer."

"What happened? Very simply, human error," Goggle vice president for search products and user experience Marissa Mayer said on the company's official blog.
Read More...
Better Earth

Alberta sun temple has 5,000-year-old calendar

Bob Weber
The Canadian Press
Sat, 31 Jan 2009 02:58 UTC
Image
© The Canadian PressAn aerial view of a 5,000-year-old stone cairn and other structures in southern Alberta that a maverick Edmonton scientist believes are the central features of an ancient sun temple and calendar that accurately marks the solstices and the equinoxes.

Edmonton - An academic maverick is challenging conventional wisdom on Canada's prehistory by claiming an archeological site in southern Alberta is really a vast, open-air sun temple with a precise 5,000-year-old calendar predating England's Stonehenge and Egypt's pyramids.

Mainstream archeologists consider the rock-encircled cairn to be just another medicine wheel left behind by early aboriginals. But a new book by retired University of Alberta professor Gordon Freeman says it is in fact the centre of a 26-square-kilometre stone ''lacework" that marks the changing seasons and the phases of the moon with greater accuracy than our current calendar.
Read More...
R2-D2

NASA: Mars Rover Is in "Good Health" after Memory Error

Alexander Toldt
eFlux Media
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:01 UTC
Mars rover
© Unknown
Spirit, one of the two NASA rovers that have been roaming Mars's surface during the past five years, has encountered some memory glitches, but will be back on track as soon as this weekend. The Spirit, the first rover NASA sent on Mars (on 3 January, 2004), surprised engineers when it lost memory and aborted a drive last Sunday.

NASA engineers still wonder what could have caused the memory loss, but there's no need to worry about Spirit, which is doing "pretty good," as William Nelson, chief of the engineering team for NASA's Mars rovers, said. Although the two rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) were not expected to last more than three months on the unfavorable surface of the Red Planet and after five years the two complex machines are still in activity, the engineers at NASA are still wondering what could have caused the memory loss.
Read More...