Science & TechnologyS


Target

Are the bays related to the extinction of the mammoth?

Dianne Tennant
The Virginian-Pilot
Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:48 UTC
The colorful elevation images of County Line Road were excitingly replete with Carolina bays - big ones, small ones, overlapping ones. The road even helpfully cut right through a few bays.

"It's a dramatic bay area," George Howard said. "In fact, I'd say it's one of the most dramatic."

Malcolm LeCompte, being more familiar with the area, cautioned, "That one that looks so prominent, it's just a flat field."

"Bay hunting is an exercise in the subtle," Howard agreed.

Howard, a Carolina bay enthusiast from Raleigh, and LeCompte, a remote imaging specialist from Elizabeth City State University, needed a bay. And they needed a bay they could dig in to look for minerals from outer space.
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Phoenix

The 'God machine' countdown

Ian Sample
The Guardian (UK)
Sat, 06 Sep 2008 11:55 UTC
Beneath the rural tranquillity of the Geneva countryside, where ramshackle sheds dot the wide-open fields, scientists are getting ready for a trip into the unknown. Here, under 100 metres of rock and sandstone, lies the biggest, most complex machine humans have ever built, and on Wednesday they will finally get to turn it on.

For Cern, the European nuclear research organisation, it will mark the end of a lengthy wait and the beginning of a new era of physics. Over the next 20 years or so, the $9bn (£5bn) machine will direct its formidable power towards some of the most enduring mysteries of the universe.
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Telescope

Encounter Of A Different Kind: Rosetta Observes Asteroid At Close Quarters


Science Daily
Sun, 07 Sep 2008 22:43 UTC
ESA's comet chaser, Rosetta, has flown by a small body in the main asteroid belt, asteroid Steins, collecting a wealth of information about this rare type of minor Solar System body.

Asteroid Steins
©ESA (c) 2008 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPM/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
Asteroid Steins seen from a distance of 800 km, taken by the OSIRIS imaging system from two different perspectives. The effective diameter of the asteroid is 5 km, approximately as predicted. At the top of the asteroid (as shown in this image), a large crater, approximately 1.5-km in size, can be seen. Scientists were amazed that the asteroid survived the impact that was responsible for the crater.

At 20:58 CEST (18:58 UT) last night, ESA's Rosetta probe approached asteroid 2867 Steins, coming to within a distance of only 800 km from it. Steins is Rosetta's first nominal scientific target in its 11½ year mission to ultimately explore the nucleus of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

The success of this 'close' encounter was confirmed at 22:14 CEST, when ESA's ground control team at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, received initial telemetry from the spacecraft. During the flyby operations, Rosetta was out of reach as regards communication links because its antenna had to be turned away from Earth. At a distance of about 2.41 AU (360 million kilometres) from our planet, the radio signal from the probe took 20 minutes to reach the ground.
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Sherlock

Melting Swiss glacier yields Neolithic trove, climate secrets


Agence France-Press
Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:03 UTC


Image
©AFP
A quiver dated from Neolithic and found at the 2,756 metre-high Schnidejoch alpine pass

Some 5,000 years ago, on a day with weather much like today's, a prehistoric person tread high up in what is now the Swiss Alps, wearing goat leather pants, leather shoes and armed with a bow and arrows.

The unremarkable journey through the Schnidejoch pass, a lofty trail 2,756 metres (9,000 feet) above sea level, has been a boon to scientists. But it would never have emerged if climate change were not melting the nearby glacier.

So far, 300 objects dating as far back as the Neolithic or New Stone Age -- about 4,000 BC in Europe -- to the later Bronze and Iron Ages and the Medieval era have been found in the site's former icefields.
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Telescope

New Comet KV42 Explains Old Mystery

Clara Moskowitz
Space.com
Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:00 UTC


Image
©space.com

Halley's comet, which lights up Earth's sky every 75 years with its glowing tail, is a bit of a scientific mystery.

So far theories have been at a loss to explain how it acquired its extremely unusual backwards orbit, but the recent discovery of another odd comet orbiting farther out in the solar system may shed light on Halley's origins.

The newly-discovered comet 2008 KV42 circles the sun at a tilt of 104 degrees compared to the main plane in which most of the planets and asteroids travel. The newfound oddball also orbits in reverse compared to almost everything else. Scientists think it might represent an intermediate point between comets like Halley's and their progenitors in the far and totally uncharted reaches of the solar system.
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Pistol

Weapons-Grade Lasers by the End of '08?

Noah Shachtman
WIRED Blog Network
Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:26 UTC
Defense contractor Northrop Grumman is promising the Pentagon that it'll have weapons-grade electric lasers by the end of 2008. Which means honest-to-goodness energy weapons might actually become a military reality, after decades of fruitless searching.

For the longest time, the military concentrated on developing chemical-powered lasers. They produced massively powerful laser blasts. But the noxious stuff needed to produce all that power makes the weapons all-but-impractical in a war zone. So the Defense Department shifted gears, and poured money into solid-state, electric lasers instead. Under its Joint High-Powered Solid State Laser (JHPSSL) project, these beams -- once considered too weak to do soldiers much good -- have made steady progress. Now Northrop is promising to hit what's widely considered to be the threshold for military-strength beams: 100 kilowatts. With that much energy, lasers should be able to knock mortars and rockets out of the sky.

Image
©Northrop Grumman

Comment: The article seems very enthusiastic about the use of this technology to create yet another weapon.

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Hourglass

Found: Ancient Capital of 'Jewish' Khazar Kingdom

Ze'ev Ben-Yechiel
Israel National News
Sat, 06 Sep 2008 16:38 UTC
A team of archaeologists claims to have discovered remnants of the legendary Khazar kingdom in southern Russia, according to a recent report. If the findings by the Russian team, reported by the French agency AFP, prove to be indeed the long-lost capital of the reputed Jewish state, they would represent one of the largest breakthroughs in Jewish archaeology.

Khazaria
©Unknown
Map of the Khazar kingdom and surrounding regions, including Israel

Comment: Hmm...circle makers vs triangle makers.

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Magic Wand

Spacecraft flies by remote asteroid, camera stops


Associated Press
Sat, 06 Sep 2008 11:28 UTC
DARMSTADT, Germany - The European deep space probe Rosetta successfully completed a flyby of an asteroid millions of miles from earth, but its high resolution camera stopped shortly before the closest pass, space officials said Saturday.

Rosetta caught up with the Steins asteroid, also known as Asteroid 2867, just after 8:45 p.m. (1845 GMT) Friday in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The probe came within 500 miles (805 kilometers) of the asteroid - which turned out to be slightly larger than scientists expected.
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Star

Theory Of Sun's Role In Formation Of Solar System Questioned


Science Daily
Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:13 UTC
A strange mix of oxygen found in a stony meteorite that exploded over Pueblito de Allende, Mexico nearly 40 years ago has puzzled scientists ever since.

meteorite
©Susan Brown
Pale specks on the surface of this meteorite are among the oldest minerals in the solar system. An odd mix of oxygen atoms within these minerals has puzzled scientists for decades.

Small flecks of minerals lodged in the stone and thought to date from the beginning of the solar system have a pattern of oxygen types, or isotopes, that differs from those found in all known planetary rocks, including those from Earth, its Moon and meteorites from Mars.

Now scientists from UC San Diego and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have eliminated one model proposed to explain the anomaly: the idea that light from the early Sun could have shifted the balance of oxygen isotopes in molecules that formed after it turned on. When they beamed light through carbon monoxide gas to form carbon dioxide, the balance of oxygen isotopes in the new molecules failed to shift in ways predicted by the model they report in the September 5 issue of Science.
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Info

'Junk DNA' May Have Triggered Key Evolutionary Changes In Human Thumb And Foot


Science Daily
Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:09 UTC
Out of the 3 billion genetic letters that spell out the human genome, Yale scientists have found a handful that may have contributed to the evolutionary changes in human limbs that enabled us to manipulate tools and walk upright.

developing thumb, wrist and ankle of mouse embryos
©Yale University
A rapidly evolving sequence from the human genome drives gene activity in the developing thumb, wrist and ankle of mouse embryos.

Results from a comparative analysis of the human, chimpanzee, rhesus macaque and other genomes reported in the journal Science suggest our evolution may have been driven not only by sequence changes in genes, but by changes in areas of the genome once thought of as "junk DNA."

Those changes activated genes in primordial thumb and big toe in a developing mouse embryo, the researchers found.

"Our study identifies a potential genetic contributor to fundamental morphological differences between humans and apes," said James Noonan, Assistant Professor of Genetics in the Yale University School of Medicine and the senior author of the study.
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