Science & TechnologyS


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First gravity map of Moon's far side unveiled

Rachel Courtland
NewScientist
Mon, 16 Feb 2009 01:21 UTC
Image
© (Illustration: Namiki et al/AAAS)The Japanese probe Kaguya has created the first map of gravity differences on the far side of the Moon, which always points away from Earth. The gravity signatures of some craters suggests the far side might have been stiffer and cooler than expected.
The first detailed map of the gravity fields on the Moon's far side shows that craters there are different than those on the near side. The results could reveal more about the Moon as it was billions of years ago, when magma flowed across its surface.

The new gravity map was collected by the Japanese lunar satellite Kaguya, which released two small probes into orbit around the Moon in 2007.
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Intense Light 'Could Detect Parkinson's'


Telegraph
Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:24 UTC
A light as bright as a million-watt bulb could help detect the early stages of Parkinson's Disease, according to scientists.

A team from Keele University, in Staffordshire, are using a "super-microscope" to spot changes in brain cells before the disease destroys them.

Dr Joanna Collingwood, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago, that the technique could allow patients to receive treatment sooner.

The researchers have been using a synchrotron - or Diamond Light Source (DLS) - at Harwell, Oxfordshire.
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Family

Deaf Children Use Hands to Invent Own Way of Communicating


PhysOrg
Sun, 15 Feb 2009 18:55 UTC
Deaf children are able to develop a language-like gesture system by making up hand signs and using homemade systems to increase their communication as they grow, just as children with conventional spoken language, research at the University of Chicago shows.

"Other studies on this 'homesigning' have usually stopped at the point the children go to school, but I have been able to follow children in Nicaragua who are not near a special education school and accordingly continue developing their homesigns independently," said Marie Coppola, a Research Associate at the University of Chicago, who presented her findings Sunday, Feb. 15 at a news briefing, "Languages without Ancestors," at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Coppola's research is the first to show that homesigning forms a foundation leading to more sophisticated, complicated communication.

The capacity of homesigners to adapt and improve their communication based on language learning underlies the growth of a new sign language, Nicaraguan Sign Language, which a community of deaf children developed independently at a school for the deaf in the country's capital of Managua, Coppola said. Homesigning is common throughout cultures, but Nicaraguan Sign Language is one of the few established sign languages that a deaf community invented and scholars have studied.
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Satellite

How to Search for Ice Age Aliens

Michael Schirber
Space
Thu, 12 Feb 2009 06:35 UTC
Ice Age
© Unknown
Could an alien astronomer have detected life on Earth during an ice age? Recent work has calculated how past climate extremes affected the light reflected from vegetation out into space. The results could give hope to our own search for life on distant worlds.

From far away, our planet is a single faint speck of light in the sky. Although we have sent radio messages out to potential extraterrestrial listeners, none of these signals have traveled more than a few tens of light years.

However, Earthlings have been broadcasting their presence to the galaxy for millions of years. Terrestrial plants reflect strongly in the infrared, resulting in a distinctive feature (called the vegetation red edge or VRE) in the light bouncing off the Earth's surface.
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Sherlock

Cambodia: Dinosaur Images Noticed in Temple Ruin

Michael Cohen
All News Web
Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00 UTC
Ruin
© UnknownDinosaur image noticed in temple ruin
Conventional science has it that the dinosaurs were wiped out many millions of years ago either as the result of climate change or a meteorite hitting earth.

Some researchers, however, claim that dinosaurs might have continued to roam remote parts of the earth as recently as a few hundred years ago. A few even claim that there might be some small populations of dinosaurs, otherwise believed to be extinct, surviving in the world's most isolated forests.
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Mixed Population Provides Insights into Human Genetic Makeup


PhysOrg
Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:00 UTC
Face
© Mark Shriver, Penn StateThese are three-dimensional images of a face with location points indicated.
Genetic diseases and genetically mixed populations can help researchers understand human diversity and human origins according to a Penn State physical anthropologist.

"We wanted to get to a strategy to predict what a face will look like," said Mark D. Shriver, associate professor of biological anthropology. "We want to understand the path of evolution that leads to that part of the selection process."

To pinpoint genes that influence the shape of the human face and head, Shriver began with an online database of genes linked to disease -- Online Mendelian Inheritance of Man. If the symptoms of the disease involved the face or skull the gene implicated in the disease became a candidate for those facial traits.

This approach works because although Shriver looked at genes implicated in disease, those same genes in a healthy person may also influence the same physical trait -- length, width, shape, size -- but within the range normal for healthy individuals. Facial traits vary among humans, but do tend to group by population. For example, in general, West Africans have wider faces than Europeans and Europeans have longer faces than West Africans.
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Laptop

Internet Emerges as Social Research Tool

Val Osowski
PhysOrg
Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:00 UTC
For the past two decades, the Internet has been used by many as an easy-to-use tool that enables the spread of information globally. Increasingly, the Web is moving beyond its use as an electronic "Yellow Pages" and online messaging platform to a virtual world where social interaction and communities can inform social science and its applications in the real world.

"Although social scientists, engineers and physical scientists have studied the World Wide Web as an entity in and of itself for some time, there is now a growing group of social scientists who are learning how to use the World Wide Web as a tool for research rather than as a subject of research," said Thomas Dietz, Michigan State University researcher and director of the university's Environmental Science and Policy Program.

Today, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago, a panel of scientists organized by Dietz planned to examine various aspects of using the World Wide Web as a tool for research.
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Telescope

Exploring Planets in Distant Space and Deep Interiors


PhysOrg
Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:00 UTC
In recent years researchers have found hundreds of new planets beyond our solar system, raising questions about the origins and properties of these exotic worlds - not to mention the possible presence of life. Speaking at a symposium titled "The Origin and Evolution of Planets" held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, two Carnegie Institution scientists will present their perspectives on the new era of planetary exploration.

Alan Boss of Carnegie's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and author of the new book The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets points out that evidence for all three classes of planets known in our Solar System - ice giants, gas giants, and terrestrial (rocky) planets - has been detected in extra-solar systems. "We already know enough now to say that the Universe is probably loaded with terrestrial planets similar to the Earth," he says. "We should expect that there are going to be many planets which are habitable, so probably some are going to be inhabited as well."

Boss expects that NASA's Kepler spacecraft, due to launch in early March and dedicated to searching for Earth-like planets, will put his ideas to the test.
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Sheeple

Baboons and Pigeons Shown to be Capable of Higher-Level Cognition in Behavioral Studies

Nicole Riehl
Medical News Today
Sat, 14 Feb 2009 10:00 UTC
It's safe to say that humans are smarter than animals, but a University of Iowa researcher is investigating the extent of that disparity in intelligence.

And, it may not be as great a gap as you suspect, according to UI psychologist Ed Wasserman, who presented his findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Chicago.

One cognitive capacity that is vital to human intelligence is the ability to determine whether two or more items are the same or different - a skill the famous American psychologist William James called the very "backbone" of our thinking. If you have two pennies in your left hand and a nickel and a dime in your right hand, then you can correctly report that the two coins in your left hand are the "same" and that the two coins in your right hand are "different." You can also make similar judgments with any collection of items.
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Fruit flies. Dogs. Now, genetics of common cold decoded

Lauran Neergaard
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Fri, 13 Feb 2009 08:35 UTC
Scientists have unraveled the genetic code of the common cold - all 99 known strains of it, to be exact. But don't expect the feat to lead to a cure for the sniffling any time soon. It turns out that rhinoviruses are even more complicated than researchers originally thought.

In fact, the genetic blueprints showed that you can catch two separate strains of cold at the same time - and those strains then can swap their genetic material inside your body to make a whole new strain.

It's why we'll never have a vaccine for the common cold, said biochemist Ann Palmenberg of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the three teams that assembled the family tree of the world's rhinoviruses.
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