Science & TechnologyS


Saturn

KISSing Galactic Cousins Break the Mold

Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW
Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:52 UTC
young giant galaxies
© NASA/SpitzerProdigies? Astronomers have found a group of galaxies that are too big for their apparent ages
Researchers conducting a routine sky survey have spotted a group of galaxies that breaks the known rules of cosmic evolution. They are too big to be as young as they seem. These unusual specimens could help improve the understanding of how giant galaxies such as the Milky Way arose.

Astronomers think they've got a pretty good handle on how today's galaxies formed. About 13 billion years ago, enormous clouds of dust and gas produced by the big bang began coalescing around central cores of dark matter. Fairly quickly these clouds further condensed and differentiated into millions of stars, many of which were far larger than our sun. Then two more things happened: The large stars burned up their nuclear fuel very quickly and exploded into supernovae. And the primordial galaxies collided and merged to form bigger and bigger versions of themselves, in the process triggering more star formation and more supernovae.
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Magic Wand

Rare Magic Inscription on Human Skull

Dan Levene
The BAS Library
Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:57 UTC
jewish skull
© Ardon Bar HamaOnly five skulls inscribed with Jewish Aramaic magic incantation texts have come to light, none from professional excavations. Like the others before it, this skull, acquired by collector Shlomo Moussaieff, raises more questions than it answers. Its relationship to the more common genre of incantation bowls and its use in a rite of magic seem clear enough. But until more information emerges, basic questions—how this skull was used, for whom, by whom and for what reason—remain unanswered.

Not long ago, the well-known collector Shlomo Moussaieff acquired two earthenware bowls, the open ends of which were adjoined to form a kind of case - inside the case was an ancient human skull. A magic incantation, written in Aramaic, was inscribed on the skull.

BAR readers already know about the more than two thousand magic incantation bowls that have survived from third - seventh-century C.E. Jewish communities in Babylonia.a The incantation bowls were made at the same time and in the very communities that produced the most intricate, complex and revered accomplishment of rabbinic Judaism, the Babylonian Talmud. Although some have deemed the incantation literature to be inconsistent with the spirit of the Talmud, recent research has shown it to be, rather, complementary and representative of aspects of life reflected within the Talmud.
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Cult

Jews used human skulls in Talmudic era


Press TV
Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:24 UTC
babylon
© presstvBabylon, present day Iraq
Archaeologists have found evidence suggesting that ancient Jews used human skulls in ceremonies, despite their religious beliefs.

Although there is a strict Halakhic prohibition on touching human remains, recently published findings suggest that ancient Jews might have ignored the rules.

Southampton University researchers said that human skulls were found in present-day Iraq (formerly Babylonia) that are believed to have been used during the Talmudic era.

According to researcher Dan Levene, some of the skulls bear Aramaic inscriptions and at least one of them seems to belong to a woman.
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Health

Flying blind: The Economist reports on health care and technology


The Economist
Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:01 UTC
Digital medicine will improve medical care - and possibly revive drug discovery too

Andy Grove thinks health-care experts should study the chip business. The former boss of Intel, a pioneering microprocessor firm, has spent a lot of time in hospitals of late because he has been battling with prostate cancer and Parkinson's disease. His experience with uneven care, medical errors and slow innovation has convinced him that the health industry needs to do much better.

Dr Grove acknowledges that health care is much more complex than chip manufacturing, but argues that the learning process in medicine is needlessly slow. In his business, firms always reserve a small portion of each newly designed chip for testing. This reduces the part available for commercial use, but it allows firms to learn quickly from failures. By contrast, health care often lacks real-time information systems and data feedback loops are sluggish. Learning comes in batches, like slow and infrequent trains, not like continuous Federal Express deliveries.

Comment: A rather one-sided report on promoting the technological 'revolution' in Medicine.

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Propaganda

Ridiculous comparison: Spam 'produces 17m tons of CO2'


BBC News
Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:08 UTC
A study into spam has blamed it for the production of more than 33bn kilowatt-hours of energy every year, enough to power more than 2.4m homes.

The Carbon Footprint of e-mail Spam report estimated that 62 trillion spam emails are sent globally every year.

This amounted to emissions of more than 17 million tons of CO2, the research by climate consultants ICF International and anti-virus firm McAfee found.

Searching for legitimate e-mails and deleting spam used some 80% of energy.

The study found that the average business user generates 131kg of CO2 every year, of which 22% is related to spam.

Comment: Yes Spam is a nuisance but to directly give it a carbon footprint is ridiculous. By taking the faulty global warming science without question, articles such as this just increase the global warming propaganda.

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Satellite

China launches 2nd satellite in alternative GPS system


Associated Press
Wed, 15 Apr 2009 05:59 UTC
China fired into orbit Wednesday its second satellite in a program to build an alternative to the global positioning system based on U.S. satellites.

The geostationary satellite is one of a series being slung into space to form the Beidou, or "Compass," navigation system, the official Xinhua News Agency said, calling the system a "crucial part of the country's space infrastructure."

The system is touted by China as an alternative to the U.S. satellite GPS network, the dominant positioning system, although it isn't clear how far China has progressed in bringing the project to fruition.
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Blackbox

Does gravity change with the seasons?

Marcus Chown
New Scientist
Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:51 UTC
Image
© Tau'olunga, Wikimedia CommonsAs the Earth orbits the sun, the strength of its gravity could vary because of interactions with an undiscovered force, nicknamed the "X-field".
Everyone has heard of Newton's apple. He watched it drop to the ground in the autumn of 1666, prompting him to ask a series of questions. "Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground?" Newton wondered. "Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the Earth's centre?"

One question Newton didn't ask is whether apples or oranges fall differently. Or whether an apple would fall differently in the spring. They might seem peculiar concerns, but Alan Kostelecký, a physicist based at Indiana University in Bloomington, thinks they are important. He and his graduate student Jay Tasson have found that such flagrant violations of our best theory of gravity could easily have evaded detection for centuries.

What's more, in a paper published in Physical Review Letters (vol 102, p 10402), the pair have shown that investigating such unlikely-seeming possibilities could help us work out what makes the universe tick. "We have made a surprising and delightful discovery," Kostelecký says. "We might just catch a glimpse of the ultimate theory that underpins our universe."
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Meteor

New Technology Reveals Close Calls With Asteroids

A. Drew Muscente
Cornell Daily Sun
Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:36 UTC
On Feb. 28, sky-watchers at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia sighted an unexpected guest: an asteroid heading directly toward the Earth. From the uncharted reaches of space, the asteroid zoomed toward the planet at 12 miles per second, forcing physicists to scramble for their calculators and crunch the numbers. Within minutes, the astronomers calculated the asteroid's size, mass, speed and vector.

At approximately 69 ft. to 154 ft. in diameter, Asteroid 2009 DD45 posed a serious threat to the planet, and despite global surveillance, no one saw it coming. A similar asteroid destroyed 800 square miles of Siberian forest in the early twentieth century.

In response to similar near-Earth encounters, Congress is currently investigating the possibility of a new mandate that would require astronomers to identify and analyze all 140 meter near-Earth objects by 2020. The most recent Congressional mandate required astronomers to identify all 1000 meter near-Earth objects by 2012.

"In the future, we're going to have hundreds of thousands to look at, but only thousands will be threatening," explained Prof. Joseph Burns, planetary sciences.

According to Burns, in past years, similar asteroids repeatedly passed near the planet, but due to the development of modern surveying technology, scientists and politicians express increasing desire to identify possible threats.
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Sun

Star crust is 10 billion times stronger than steel

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:07 UTC
Image
© Casey Reed/Penn State UniversityThe crust of a neutron star is strong enough to hold up ultra-dense mountains, a new simulation suggests. As the star spins, these bumps could produce ripples in the fabric of space that may be detectable from Earth.
The crust of neutron stars is 10 billion times stronger than steel, according to new simulations. That makes the surface of these ultra-dense stars tough enough to support long-lived bulges that could produce gravitational waves detectable by experiments on Earth.

Neutron stars are the cores left behind when relatively massive stars explode in supernovae. They are incredibly dense, packing about as much mass as the sun into a sphere just 20 kilometres or so across, and some rotate hundreds of times per second.

Because of their extreme gravity and rotational speed, neutron stars could potentially make large ripples in the fabric of space - but only if their surfaces contain bumps or other imperfections that would make them asymmetrical.

A number of mechanisms have been proposed to create these bumps. The stars could, for example, gobble up material from a companion star. Bulges could also bubble up over hotter areas of the stars.
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Blackbox

Inside the tangled world of string theory

Matthew Chalmers
New Scientist
Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:57 UTC
Image
© George GrassieEdward Witten is at CERN this year and had hoped to see the first data from the new Large Hadron Collider
Listening to Ed Witten talk physics can be a little unsettling. His concise sentences resemble steps in a logical proof: his grammar is flawless and his eyes occasionally close as he translates the great sweep of knowledge that has earned him exospheric academic status. This softly spoken man leaves you in a state of mental disarray.

This year Witten is in Europe, on sabbatical at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva in Switzerland, where the mathematical foundations of reality are about to be rocked by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). As it happened, he turned up on the day last September that the LHC switched on. "Ed's very active, so it's great to have him around," says Luis Alvarez-Gaume, head of CERN's theory department. "He's a genius, it's as simple as that."

Such accolades haven't secured Witten a plush office, as I discovered when I met him in his sparse accommodation at CERN. Nor does he appear comfortable with the effusive descriptions sometimes applied to him - such as the "world's cleverest man" or "Einstein's successor". "Believe me," he says, "I'm definitely no Einstein." Yet these monikers are founded in more than mere hyperbole. For the past 25 years Witten has been at the forefront of attempts to unify nature's four fundamental forces in a single framework - a goal pursued for a similar period by Einstein. And he has been credited with writing the largest number of high-impact papers of any living physicist.
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