Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Kepler telescope reaches orbit: NASA


NineMSN
Mon, 09 Mar 2009 05:05 UTC
The Kepler space telescope launched by NASA to search for Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy has reached orbit, the US space agency said.

The telescope separated from its carrier, a Delta II rocket, 62 minutes after launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at the altitude of more than 721 kilometres, NASA said.
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Telescope

Unexpected source of gamma rays discovered


PhysOrg
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:10 UTC
MAGIC Telescope
© Grupo MAGICTelescopio MAGIC en La Palma (Canarias).

An international team of astrophysicists, involving several research groups in Spain, has discovered a source of very high energy gamma rays in the region of the distant galaxies 3C 66A and 3C 66B. This new gamma emission, observed from the MAGIC telescope in La Palma (Canary Islands) is not consistent with what scientists expected to find, and has resulted in them suggesting three hypotheses to explain their origin.

In 2007, the MAGIC telescope, located in the Roque de los Muchachos observatory on the Canary island of La Palma, spent more than 50 hours examining the 3C 66A galaxy region, which is about 3 billion light years from Earth. The results of those observations led to the discovery of a source of very high energy gamma rays (over 150 billion electron volts), as published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters journal.

The researcher, Errando Manel, from the Institut de Física d'Altes Energies (IFAE), one of the institutions involved in the study, explained to SINC that very high energy gamma rays "are a type of extremely high energy light which rarely occurs in nature". They are generally associated with violent phenomena such as supernova explosions or jets of high energy particles that form around black holes.
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Palette

Sound of long-lost Ancient Greek instruments recreated by computer experts

Murad Ahmed
The Times Online
Mon, 09 Mar 2009 03:29 UTC
ancient greek musicians
© engraving by Alexandre de la BordeMusical competition with lyre and double flute, from red-figure Greek vase, 1813
The long-lost sounds of the epigonion, the salpinx and the kithara could be about to form the strangest musical group yet, thanks to the world's largest physics project.

Listen to the sound of the epigonion

The epigonion, a harp-like musical instrument, was last played in Ancient Greece. But computer scientists have resurrected its sound as part of a project to conjure up an orchestra of long-lost instruments.

"It is a really interesting sound, metallic, crisp and bright," said Domenico Vicinanza, an engineer at Astra, an Italian project based in Salerno and Catania.

"It fits perfectly in Middle Ages and baroque music ensembles, melding wonderfully with strings and woodwinds." They don't know exactly what it looked like but they have used historical sources to re-create what it would have sounded like.
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Magnify

Rare dinosaur handprints discovered

John Pickrell
Cosmos
Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:25 UTC
Image
© H. Ky LutermanHandy prints: Artist's impression of the formation of the tracks by the carnivorous dinosaur Dilophosaurus.
Sydney: Rare fossilised handprints of a carnivorous dinosaur have helped answer questions about the orientation of limbs which later evolved into wings in birds.

"Other supposed theropod hand prints had been reported in the past, but they were all either shapeless blobs or made by animals with downward-facing palms," said Martin Lockley of the University of Colorado in Denver, a dinosaur tracks expert and co-author of a paper detailing the find in the open access journal PloS One.
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Blackbox

A bizarre universe may be lurking in the shadows

Anil Ananthaswamy
New Scientist
Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:13 UTC
Image
© Alberto Rizzo / Photodisc / GettyDark matter is all around us, but what is it made of?

It is 3.30am on 26 December 2007 in McMurdo, Antarctica. The crew at the long-duration balloon facility have stayed up all night in sub-zero temperatures, waiting for the winds to subside. Finally, the gigantic balloon lifts off. Filled with about a million cubic metres of helium, it soars high into the stratosphere carrying an experiment called ATIC.

For 19 days, ATIC circled the South Pole, studying cosmic rays coming from space. Then, nearly a year later, the ATIC team made a stunning announcement: they found that more high-energy electrons had left their mark on the experiment than expected. That might not sound like much, but the result is remarkable because it might be a telltale sign of dark matter, the invisible stuff thought to make up about 85 per cent of matter in the universe.

And it's not the only one. Just months before, an Italian-led collaboration reported that their satellite-based experiment, called PAMELA, had seen a similar excess of electrons, along with an excess of positrons. Add to this earlier results from gamma-ray satellites and experiments searching for dark matter here on Earth, and suddenly we have an abundance of new clues about dark matter. "It is a very exciting time to be doing dark-matter physics," says Dan Hooper, a physicist at the Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.
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Saturn

Cannibalistic Jupiter ate its early moons

Marcus Chown
New Scientist
Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:08 UTC
Jupiter
© JPL / NASAJupiter now has only four large moons, but in the early days of the solar system it may have had 20 or more.

The four giant "Galilean" moons orbiting Jupiter are the last survivors of at least five generations of moons that once circled the gas giant.

"All the other moons - and there could have been 20 or more - were devoured by the planet in the early days of the solar system," says Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

The four Galilean moons have played a key role in the history of science - their discovery by Galileo 400 years ago provided irrefutable evidence that not all bodies orbited the Earth. But until recently, nobody had suspected that Jupiter had once had many more moons.
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Evil Rays

Malicious software enables cellphone surveillance


Taipei Times
Sun, 08 Mar 2009 03:47 UTC
The Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) on Friday took into custody a manager of a company that sold illegal software allowing those interested in obtaining private information to send unidentified SMS text messages to infect cellphones.

Once a phone has been infected, the sender could listen in on private conversations and view the recipient's text messages, police said, adding that people with cellphones using the Symbian 60 operating system were at the greatest risk of becoming infected.
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Rocket

Preparing for a journey to Mars: crew locked for 105 days in simulator - Last opportunity for media


European Space Agency
Sat, 07 Mar 2009 23:05 UTC
Image
© European Space AgencyThe crew will enter the facility on 31 March
On 31 March, a crew of six, including a French pilot and a German engineer, will embark on a 105-day simulated Mars mission. They will enter a special facility at the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow, to emerge only three months later.

Their mission will help in understanding the psychological and medical aspects of long-duration spaceflight. Media representatives are invited to meet the participants just before they enter the isolation facility.
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Snowman

Beads get ball rolling on avalanche prediction

Anil Ananthaswamy
New Scientist
Sat, 07 Mar 2009 22:10 UTC
avalanche sign
© Kimball Andrew Schmidt / JupiterA partially snow-buried highway sign warning of avalanches in Loveland Pass, Colorado
The seeming impossibility of predicting the next big avalanche or earthquake has often been blamed on the inherent unpredictability of complex systems. A unique experiment suggests that this idea may be wrong. Accurate prediction may just be a matter of analysing the most relevant information.

Phenomena as diverse as earthquakes, stock market collapses and avalanches follow so-called power-law distributions. Take the intensity of earthquakes: there are very few large tremblors and many small ones.

It is now known that even a minor perturbation can cause a major event when such systems reach a critical state because of a build-up of stress. Similarly, the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld model of sandpile avalanches, shows there is no way of knowing whether the next event would be big or small, says Henrik Jensen of Imperial College London, an expert on complex systems.
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Chalkboard

Record-breaking algorithm really packs them in

Colin Barras
New Scientist
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:00 UTC
algorithm illustration
© Johannes Schneider and colleaguesA new algorithm can pack any 50 differently sized discs into a smaller space than any other, and could help pack 3D objects into smaller spaces too. That could make shipping and delivery services less tough on resources
Geeky holidaymakers wanting to take more on a trip, as well as delivery firms trying to maximise loads and storage, could benefit from a new algorithm that packs collections of differently sized 2D shapes into the smallest available space with unprecedented efficiency.

This may seem like a more academic version of the video game Tetris, but the techniques developed can be applied to 3D problems in the real world. Increasing packing efficiency this way would lower the cost and also the environmental impact of shipping.

Fitting a set of objects into the smallest amount of space is such a complex scientific problem that researchers have yet to calculate the single best solution if more than around 20 objects are involved.

To get closer to that optimum fit, researchers pit their algorithms against each other in competitions to solve particular packing problems, such as fitting a collection of differently sized discs inside the smallest circle possible without overlaps. Johannes Schneider's team at the University of Mainz has just smashed all previous records in that disc-packing problem.
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