Science & TechnologyS


Bizarro Earth

Flashback Upstart Ice Age Theory Gets Attentive But Chilly Hearing

Richard A. Kerr
Science Magazine
Fri, 11 Jul 1997 22:52 UTC
Selling a new gizmo to replace a longtime favorite is always a tough job--especially if few are convinced that the original is broken. Physicist Richard Muller of the University of California, Berkeley, knows what it's like: For several years, he has been pitching a new way to drive the comings and goings of the ice ages. He's trying to displace the cherished Milankovitch mechanism in which cyclical changes in the elliptical shape of Earth's orbit shift the pattern of solar heating, triggering the buildup or melting of ice sheets.

Image
©R. MULLER AND G. MACDONALD
Battling curves. The single cycle of Earth's changing orbital inclination (green) seems a better match to climate (red) than the multiple cycles of orbital eccentricity (blue).
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Network

Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole

Kim Zetter
Wired
Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:07 UTC


Security researchers
©Unknown

Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency.

The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its destination.
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Info

First Prehistoric Pregnant Turtle And Nest Of Eggs Discovered In Southern Alberta


Science Daily
Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:16 UTC
A 75-million-year-old fossil of a pregnant turtle and a nest of fossilized eggs that were discovered in the badlands of southeastern Alberta by scientists and staff from the University of Calgary and the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology are yielding new ideas on the evolution of egg-laying and reproduction in turtles and tortoises.

Image
©Ken Bendiktsen

It is the first time the fossil of a pregnant turtle has been found and the description of this discovery was published today in the British journal Biology Letters.

The mother carrying the eggs was found in 1999 by Tyrrell staff while the nest of eggs was discovered in 2005 by U of C scientist Darla Zelenitsky, the lead author of the article and an expert on fossil nest sites, and her field assistant. Both were found about 85 km south of Medicine Hat in the Manyberries area.
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Sherlock

Clash Of Clusters Provides New Dark Matter Clue


Science Daily
Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:03 UTC
New Hubble and Chandra observations of the cluster known as MACSJ0025.4-1222 indicate that a titanic collision has separated dark from ordinary matter. This provides independent confirmation of a similar effect detected previously in a target dubbed the Bullet Cluster, showing that the Bullet Cluster is not an anomalous case.

Galaxy Cluster MACS J0025.4-1222
©NASA, ESA, CXC, M. Bradac (University of California, Santa Barbara), and S. Allen (Stanford University)
Hubble and Chandra Composite of the Galaxy Cluster MACS J0025.4-1222.

MACSJ0025 formed after an enormously energetic collision between two large clusters. Using visible-light images from Hubble, astronomers were able to infer the total mass distribution - dark and ordinary matter. Hubble was used to map the dark matter (coloured in blue) using a technique known as gravitational lensing.
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Sherlock

Bone Parts Don't Add Up To Conclusion Of Hobbit-like Palauan Dwarfs


Science Daily
Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:44 UTC
Misinterpreted fragments of leg bones, teeth and brow ridges found in Palau appear to be an archaeologist's undoing, according to researchers at three institutions. They say that the so-called dwarfs of these Micronesian islands actually were modern, normal-sized hunters and gatherers.

Image
©Jim Barlow
A close-up view of the teeth shows their size as well as betel staining -- a red byproduct of chewing betel, an Areca palm nut along with slaked lime and leaf of the Piper betel vine. Betel has slight stimulant and medicinal qualities.

Scientists from the University of Oregon, North Carolina State University and the Australian National University have refuted the conclusion of Lee R. Berger and colleagues that Hobbit-like little people once lived there.

"Our evidence indicates the earliest inhabitants of Palau were of normal stature, and it counters the evidence that Berger, et al, presented in their paper indicating there was a reduced stature population in early Palau," said University of Oregon anthropologist Greg C. Nelson. "Our research from whole bones and whole skeletons indicates that the earliest individuals in Palau were of normal stature but gracile. In other words, they were thin."
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Telescope

New Space Telescope Reveals Entire Gamma-ray Sky


Science Daily
Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:07 UTC
NASA's Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) has revealed its first all-sky map in gamma rays. Scientists expect the telescope will discover many new pulsars in our own galaxy, reveal powerful processes near super-massive black holes at the cores of thousands of active galaxies and enable a search for signs of new physical laws.

Image
©NASA/DOE/International LAT Team
This all-sky view from GLAST reveals bright emission in the plane of the Milky Way (center), bright pulsars and super-massive black holes.

The onboard Large Area Telescope's (LAT) all-sky image - which shows the glowing gas of the Milky Way, blinking pulsars and a flaring galaxy billions of light-years away - was created using only 95 hours of "first light" observations, compared with past missions which took years to produce a similar image.

The NASA mission was made possible by collaboration with many U.S. and international partners. As part of its support for particle physics research, DOE contributed funding to the LAT - the primary instrument on GLAST - and DOE's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) managed the LAT construction. SLAC also played a key role in assembling the instrument and now plays the central role in LAT science operations, data processing and making scientific data available to collaborators for analysis.
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Info

Secret Of Newborn's First Words Revealed


Science Daily
Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:03 UTC
A new study could explain why "daddy" and "mommy" are often a baby's first words - the human brain may be hard-wired to recognize certain repetition patterns.

Image
©iStockphoto/Aldo Murillo
A new study could explain why "daddy" and "mommy" are often a baby's first words -- the human brain may be hard-wired to recognize certain repetition patterns.

Using the latest optical brain imaging techniques, University of British Columbia post-doctoral fellow Judit Gervain and a team of researchers from Italy and Chile documented brain activities of 22 newborns (2-3 days old) when exposed to recordings of made-up words.

The researchers mixed words that end in repeating syllables - such as "mubaba" and "penana" - with words without repetition - such as "mubage" and "penaku." They found increased brain activities in the temporal and left frontal areas of the newborns' brain whenever the repetitious words were played. Words with non-adjacent repetitions ("bamuba" or "napena") elicited no distinctive responses from the brain.

"It's probably no coincidence that many languages around the world have repetitious syllables in their 'child words' - baby and daddy in English, papa in Italian and tata (grandpa) in Hungarian, for example," says Gervain from UBC Dept. of Psychology's Infant Studies Centre.
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Star

Celestial happenings coming in September

David L. Richards
Ohio.com
Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:05 UTC
Saturn's ring system visible in September

You can look forward to two occultations in September.

At evening twilight on Sept. 12, the waxing gibbous moon occults Neptune. Starting about 8:42 p.m., the ice giant disappears behind the moon, and reappears about 9:47 p.m. Neptune is at magnitude 7.2, so you will need binoculars to observe this fairly rare event, in the constellation Capricorn.
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Robot

Intel CTO: Gap between Humans, Machines Closing


CXOtoday
Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:32 UTC


Justin Rattner
©Stephen Shankland/CNET News
Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner agrees with futurist Ray Kurzweil's assessment that the "singularity", when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence, is nigh.

Justin Rattner, CTO of Intel Cop. has predicted big changes in social interactions, robotics, and improvements in the computer's ability to sense the real world and he believes these changes will be seen sooner rather than later.

"The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago," Rattner said, speaking at the Intel Developer's Forum. "There is speculation that we may be approaching an inflection point where the rate of technology advancements is accelerating at an exponential rate, and machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason, in the not so distant future."
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Info

New Evidence Debunks 'Stupid' Neanderthal Myth


Science Daily
Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:31 UTC
Research by UK and American scientists has struck another blow to the theory that Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) became extinct because they were less intelligent than our ancestors (Homo sapiens). The research team has shown that early stone tool technologies developed by our species, Homo sapiens, were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals.

Image
©iStockphoto/Klaus Nilkens
Early stone tool technologies developed by our species, Homo sapiens, were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals (like the one shown in the above model), new research shows.

Published in the Journal of Human Evolution, their discovery debunks a textbook belief held by archaeologists for more than 60 years.

The team from the University of Exeter, Southern Methodist University, Texas State University, and the Think Computer Corporation, spent three years flintknapping (producing stone tools). They recreated stone tools known as 'flakes,' which were wider tools originally used by both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and 'blades,' a narrower stone tool later adopted by Homo sapiens. Archaeologists often use the development of stone blades and their assumed efficiency as proof of Homo sapiens' superior intellect. To test this, the team analysed the data to compare the number of tools produced, how much cutting-edge was created, the efficiency in consuming raw material and how long tools lasted.
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