Science & TechnologyS


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First draft of Neanderthal genome completed

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:28 UTC
neanderthal
© Anthropological Institute, University of Zürich

The wait is over. The Neanderthal genome is complete. Well, kind of.

Nature is reporting today that a team of German scientists has completed a rough draft of the genome of a Neanderthal, a project we've followed closely at New Scientist.

In December, I spoke with team member Adrian Briggs of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. At that point, the team was half-way through decoding 3 billion bases of DNA belonging to a Neanderthal recovered in Croatia's Vindija Cave.

It looks like they really cranked up their sequencers the past couple months. Team leader Svante Pääbo will officially announce their accomplishment at next week's annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago, according to Nature. His team plans to publish the sequence in a journal later this year. I look forward to the announcement and the paper's publication, but the work is not over. Not even close.
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Info

Born believers: How your brain creates God

Michael Brooks
New Scientist
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:38 UTC
While many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."
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Robot

Unnatural selection: Robots start to evolve

Paul Marks
New Scientist
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:09 UTC
Image
© Robert Gordon UniversityA robot with a brain that grows as its body develops could lead to more versatile humanoid robots and prosthetics

Living creatures took millions of years to evolve from amphibians to four-legged mammals - with larger, more complex brains to match. Now an evolving robot has performed a similar trick in hours, thanks to a software "brain" that automatically grows in size and complexity as its physical body develops.

Existing robots cannot usually cope with physical changes - the addition of a sensor or new type of limb, say - without a complete redesign of their control software, which can be time-consuming and expensive.

So artificial intelligence engineer Christopher MacLeod and his colleagues at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, UK, created a robot that adapts to such changes by mimicking biological evolution. "If we want to make really complex humanoid robots with ever more sensors and more complex behaviours, it is critical that they are able to grow in complexity over time - just like biological creatures did," he says.
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Telescope

Giant star factory found in early galaxy

Maggie McKee
New Scientist
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:00 UTC
galaxy Arp 220,
© NASA/ESA/C Wilson/McMaster UniversityThe heart of the nearby galaxy Arp 220, shown in this Hubble image, is bursting with star birth. But a much larger starburst region has been found in a galaxy in the early universe

A stellar factory millions of times larger than anything comparable in the Milky Way has been identified in a galaxy in the very early universe. The work bolsters the case that massive galaxies formed very quickly - in spectacular bursts of star formation - soon after the big bang.

Regions of intense star formation, called starbursts, span a few light years at most in the Milky Way, and less than a few hundred light years in nearby, bright galaxies such as Arp 220 (pictured). But it has not been clear how large the stellar nurseries were in the early universe.

To find out, researchers led by Fabian Walter of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, carefully scrutinised a distant galaxy whose light has taken so long to reach Earth that it appears as it was just 870 million years after the big bang.
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Info

The credit crunch could be a boon for irrational belief


New Scientist
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:44 UTC
Science has allowed us to smooth over many of the natural ups and downs of human existence. We have predictable harvests, food on supermarket shelves, savings and pensions that will help us get through difficult times, and economies that provide most people with what they need to survive. Alongside these developments a rational, scientific world view has become the dominant mode of thought.

Take the comforts away, however, and the rationality often evaporates too. When human beings lose control over their lives, they become more prone to superstition, spiritual searchings and conspiracy theories.

Some of these losses of control are self-inflicted: studies show that people in risky professions - deep-sea fishermen and sky-divers, for example - perform a greater number of superstitious rituals than those with safe desk jobs. Others, though, are a response to circumstances. For example, people living in high-risk areas of the Middle East, such as Tel Aviv, are much more likely to carry a lucky charm or avoid walking under ladders. A 2007 study showed that the growth rate of evangelical churches in the US jumps 50 per cent with the downturn of each economic cycle. The global downturn is no different: church leaders (and psychics) are now reporting brisk business.
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Info

To the Extreme: NASA Tests Heat Shield Materials


The International Space Fellowship
Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:39 UTC
NASA's new spacecraft Orion will face extreme conditions throughout its voyage to the moon and the journey home. On the blistering return through Earth's atmosphere, Orion will make good use of atmospheric drag to decelerate from more than 25,000 miles per hour (40,233 kph) but, in the process, encounter temperatures as high as 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius). And while orbiting the moon and Earth, temperatures can fluctuate up to 400 F (222 C).

AVCOAT speciman
© NASA/Sean SmithTesting an AVCOAT specimen in an environmental chamber at NASA Langley.
To protect Orion and its crew from such severe conditions, NASA's Constellation Program is developing a new thermal protection system, an effort led by NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.
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Telescope

Scientists detect exoplanet in Hubble archive


Newspost Online
Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:28 UTC
The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted an exoplanet in an image that was captured 10 years ago, which raises hope that more planets lie buried in Hubbles vast archive.

In 1998, Hubble studied the star HR 8799 in the infrared, as part of a search for planets around young and relatively nearby stars. The search came up empty.

Last year, Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and colleagues looked at the same star using the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii.

They discovered three planets, each about 10 times as massive as Jupiter. They succeeded where the Hubble team failed mainly because of new strategies developed to carefully subtract the stars glare, leaving only the faint infrared glow from its planets.

Now, according to a report in New Scientist, Marois and David Lafreniere, of the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, decided to apply their new mathematical tools to the decade-old Hubble image.
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Sun

Is the Roman Pantheon a colossal sundial?

Jo Marchant
New Scientist
Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:03 UTC
Image
© Paul Chesley/ Stone/GettyA hollowed-out hemisphere with a hole in the top was a type of sundial used in Roman times, albeit on a much smaller scale, to show the time of year.

Has the grand Roman Pantheon been keeping a secret for nearly 2000 years? An expert in ancient timekeeping thinks so, arguing that it acts as a colossal sundial.

The imposing temple in Rome, completed in AD 128, is one of the most impressive buildings that survives from antiquity. It consists of a cylindrical chamber topped by a domed roof with an oculus in the top which lets through a dramatic shaft of sunlight. It boasts a colonnaded courtyard at the front.
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Frog

Fossil of 43-foot super snake Titanoboa found in Colombia

Thomas H. Maugh II
Los Angeles Times
Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:56 UTC
At 2,500 pounds and as long as a school bus, Titanoboa could eat crocodiles. It lived after dinosaurs died out, and changes scientists' ideas about 'how big a snake can be.'

Snakes
© Jason Bourque/U of FloridaPartial skeletons of the giant, boa-constrictor-like snake named "Titanoboa" found in Colombia hint that there may be no cap on temperatures in the tropics as global warming kicks in.
Researchers excavating a coal mine in South America have found the fossilized remains of the mother of all snakes, a nightmarish tropical behemoth as long as a school bus and as heavy as a Volkswagen Beetle.

Modern boas and anacondas, which average less than 20 feet in length and reach a maximum of 30 feet, have been known to swallow Chihuahuas, cats and other small pets, but this prehistoric monster ate giant turtles and primitive crocodiles.

"This is amazing. It challenges everything we know about how big a snake can be," said herpetologist Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was not involved in the research.
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Meteor

Powerful New Technique to Measure Asteroids' Sizes and Shapes


PhysOrg
Wed, 04 Feb 2009 10:31 UTC
Barbara
© ESO/L. CalçadaArtist’s impression of the asteroid (234) Barbara. Thanks to a unique method that uses ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer, astronomers have been able to measure sizes of small asteroids in the main belt for the first time.
A team of French and Italian astronomers have devised a new method for measuring the size and shape of asteroids that are too small or too far away for traditional techniques, increasing the number of asteroids that can be measured by a factor of several hundred. This method takes advantage of the unique capabilities of ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI).

"Knowledge of the sizes and shapes of asteroids is crucial to understanding how, in the early days of our Solar System, dust and pebbles collected together to form larger bodies and how collisions and re-accumulation have since modified them," says Marco Delbo from the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, France, who led the study.

Direct imaging with adaptive optics on the largest ground-based telescopes such as the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, and space telescopes, or radar measurements are the currently favoured methods of asteroid measurement. However, direct imaging, even with adaptive optics, is generally limited to the one hundred largest asteroids of the main belt, while radar measurements are mostly constrained to observations of near-Earth asteroids that experience close encounters with our planet.
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